Division  "£>^3  4-1 

Section  .K2_q 


1 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Archive 
in  2019  with  funding  from 
Princeton  Theological  Seminary  Library 


https://archive.org/details/mindheredityOOkell 


I 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


. .  -  - - ■  . 


LOUIS  CLARK  VANUXEM  FOUNDATION 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


v'" 

BY  VERNON  L.  KELLOGG 


PRINCETON 

PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY  PRESS 

London:  Humphrey  Milford 
Oxford  University  Press 

19  2  3 


Copyrighted  1923  by  Princeton  University  Press 


THE  PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY  PRESS  PRINCETON  U.S.A. 


CONTENTS 


Introduction  i 

The  Instinct  Mind  of  Ammophila  1 

Reiiexes  of  Honey-bees  and 


Silkworm  Moths 

13 

Other  Reflexes  and  Tropisms 

23 

Intelligence  and  Reason 

31 

The  Inheritance  of  Mind 

41 

Intelligence  Tests 

51 

Education  and  the  Mind 

GO 

Societal  Organization  and 

Mental  Capacity 

70 

Racial  Traits  and 

Immigration 

87 

Heredity  a?id  Environment 
in  Mind  Determination 

101 

PRINCETON  UNIVERSITY 


THE  LOUIS  CLARK  VANUXEM 
FOUNDATION 

This  Foundation  was  established  in  1912 
with  a  bequest  of  $25,000  under  the  will  of 
Louis  Clark  Vanuxem,  of  the  Class  of  1879. 
By  direction  of  the  executors  of  Mr.  Van- 
uxenTs  estate,  the  income  of  the  Foundation 
is  to  be  used  for  a  series  of  public  lectures 
delivered  in  Princeton  annually,  at  least 
one  half  of  which  shall  be  on  subjects  of  cur¬ 
rent  scientific  interest.  The  lectures  are  to 
be  published  and  distributed  among  schools 
and  libraries  generally. 

THE  FOLLOWING  LECTURES  HAVE  BEEN 
PUBLISHED 

The  Theory  of  Permutable  Functions 

By  Vito  Volterra 

Lectures  delivered  in  Princeton  in  connection 
with  the  dedication  of  the  Graduate  College  of 
Princeton  University ,  by  Emile  Boutroux, 
Alois  Riehl,  A.D.  Godley ,  and  Arthur  Shipley 


Romance 


By  the  late  Sir  Walter  Raleigh 

A  Crit  ique  of  the  Theory  of  Evolution 

By  Thomas  Hunt  Morgan 

Platonism 


By  Paul  Elmer  More 

Human  Efficiency  and  Levels  of  Intelligence 

By  Henry  Herbert  Goddard 

Philosophy  and  Civilization  in  the  Middle 
Ages 

By  Maurice  De  Wulf 
The  Defective  Delinquent  and  Insane 

By  Henry  A.  Cotton 

Nature's  Simple  Plan 

By  Chauncey  B.  Tinker 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


INTRODUCTION 


We  have  a  convenient  single  word  to  ex¬ 
press  our  confession  of  ignorance  when 
faced  with  things  we  do  not  understand.  We 
apply  this  word  to  the  unexplained  things  of 
our  own  body ,  to  things  in  the  world  about  us, 
to  things  of  the  apparently  infinite  universe. 
We  call  such  things  mysteries ,  and  to  many  of 
us,  especially  the  more  tender-minded  among 
us,  the  labeling  of  a  thing  as  mystery  ends  dis¬ 
cussion  of  it.  To  others,  tougher -minded,  it  is 
the  very  incitement  to  discussion,  and,  to  some, 
the  activating  stimulus  to  prolonged  and  fever¬ 
ish  study.  It  is,  of  course,  chiefly,  if  not  entire¬ 
ly,  by  such  study  that  we  ever  can  and  do  get 
anywhere  in  the  fascinating  game  of  solving 
mystery. 

The  methods  of  such  study  are  familiar ; 
they  are  primarily  descriptive  and  analytic. 
We  call  them  scientific.  They  break  up  the  big 
mystery  into  little  ones;  they  sometimes  suc¬ 
ceed  in  reaching  an  immediate — although  nev¬ 
er  an  ultimate — rather  satisfying  explanation 
of  some  of  these  little  parts  of  the  big  whole .  By 

[  i  1 


11 


Introduction 


these  methods  we  re-describe ,  which  is  a  form 
of  approximate  explanation ,  these  parts  of  the 
mystery  and  sometimes  the  whole  mystery.  If 
it  is  a  mystery  of  life  and  so-called  vital  forces 
— and  no  kind  of  mystery  is  more  fascinating 
to  us  nor  more  feverishly  discussed  and  studied 
than  this  kind — we  re-describe  it ,  or  bits  of  it, 
in  terms  of  non-life ,  and  of  forces  of  physics 
and  chemistry.  We  analyze  protoplasm ,  the 
physical  basis  of  life ,  into  chemical  and  elec¬ 
tric  elements.  We  re-describe  the  simpler  vital 
phenomena  in  terms  of  mechanics.  There  is  a 
veritable  mechanistic  school  of  scientific  stu¬ 
dents  of  life,  a  most  active  and  aggressive 
school.  The  American  leader  of  this  school 
writes  a  guide-book  for  his  followers  called 
“ The  Mechanistic  Conception  of  Life  ”  The 
strength  and  vogue  of  this  school  rest  on  the  as¬ 
sumption  that  a  re-description  of  life  in  terms 
of  mechanics  is  an  explanation  of  life.  To  be 
sure  it  carries  the  life  mystery  from  one  field  of 
study  into  another  in  which  we  have  been  more 
successful  in  describing  a  wide  variety  of  struc¬ 
tures  and  phenomena  as  manifestations  of  a 
few  basic  structures  and  happenings ,  and  a  re- 


Introduction 


in 


description  of  this  sort  may  be  accepted  as  a 
welcome  nearer  approach  toward  real  explan¬ 
ation  9  although ,  of  course ,  it  leaves  ultimate 
causes  and  conditions  to  remain  as  much  of  a 
mystery  as  ever.  Perhaps  this  is  well ,  for  life 
robbed  of  mystery  would  be  drab  indeed.  The 
stimulus  of  mystery  is  a  mainspring  of  the 
higher  human  activities. 

Now  all  this  applies  precisely  to  our  atti¬ 
tude  toward  mind,  by  which  we  usually,  and 
perhaps  unfortunately  for  our  hope  in  reach¬ 
ing  any  understanding  of  mind,  mean  just 
human  mind.  But  this  is  understandable ;  for 
human  mind  means  more  to  us  than  all  other 
mind  and  than  all  else  human.  We  speak  of 
good  minds  and  poor  minds;  of  minds  of  tal¬ 
ent  and  of  genius;  of  feeblemindedness  and  in¬ 
sanity;  of  the  quick  mind  and  slow  mind;  of 
the  unconscious  mind  and  the  creative  mind. 
These  are  kinds  of  mind.  But  we  mean  by  all 
of  these,  kinds  of  human  mind,  and,  even  more 
limitedly,  kinds  and  conditions  of  functioning 
of  the  human  brain. 

I  wish  to  use  the  name  mind  in  a  broader,  if 
less  interesting  way;  a  much  broader  way,  in- 


IV 


Introduction 


deed ,  so  as  to  indicate  by  it  both  a  wider  occur¬ 
rence  of  mind  in  Nature  than  in  human  be¬ 
ings  alone ,  and  a  wider  inclusion  of  seats  of 
mind ,  even  in  human  beings ,  than  the  brain 
alone.  I  want  to  use  mind  to  mean  almost  ev¬ 
erything  that  acts  as  control  of  animal  or  hu¬ 
man  behavior ,  with  a  recognition  that  other 
parts  of  the  nervous  system  besides  the  brain , 
and  even  body-parts  not  composed  of  nerve  tis¬ 
sues  at  all ,  may  play  a  role  in  mind.  1  want  to 
assume  even  that  animals  with  no  specialized 
nervous  system  whatever  may  have  mind ,  that 
isy  may  respond  by  action  in  a  recognizable 
and  even  predictable  way  to  stimuli.  There 
are ,  indeed ,  some  plants ,  like  the  quickly  re¬ 
sponding  sensitive  plant  and  the  diabolically 
effective  sun-dews  and  Venus  fly-traps  which 
attract ,  imprison  and  digest  small  insects ,  that 
might  fairly  be  considered  to  have  a  kind  of 
mind.  An  Indian  naturalist  of  some  repute , 
Dr.  Bose ,  writes  constantly  about  the  “ mind  of 
plants 

Someone  may  think  that  this  taking  all 
meaning  out  of  mind.  I  think ,  rather ,  that  it  is 
putting  new  and  usef  ul  meaning  into  it.  that 


Introduction 


v 


to  do  anything  less  than  this  is  to  limit  our¬ 
selves  to  an  anthropocentric  interpretation  of 
mind ,  which  may  tend  to  obscure  our  under¬ 
standing  of  what  our  own  mind  really  is. 
Mind  in  Nature  is  surely  something  much 
wider  than  that  special  manifestation  of  it  as 
a  function  of  the  human  brain.  Of  course ,  we 
must ,  for  practical  reasons ,  if  no  others ,  limit 
somewhere  our  generosity  in  the  way  of  a  defi¬ 
nition  of  mind ,  else  we  might  involve  ourselves 
in  that  too  logical  predicament  of  finding  our¬ 
selves  talking  about  the  “ consciousness  of  the 
molecule”  as  some  of  our  predecessors  have 
actually  done.  But  we  must  at  least  be  broad¬ 
minded  enough  in  our  talking  about  mind  to 
escape  the  cry  of  anthropocentrism  from  the 
lower  animals ,  such  animals ,  say ,  as  Ammo- 
pliila ,  the  sand-loving  wasp  of  the  salt-marshes 
of  San  Francisco  Bay ,  about  which  I  purpose 
now  to  give  a  true  story.  1  am  sure  it  is  true , 
for  I  have  seen  repeatedly  all  the  incidents  of 
this  story. 


THE  INSTINCT  MIND 
OF  AMMOPHILA 


long  the  western  shores  of  the  long 


southern  arm  of  San  Francisco  Bay 
there  stretch  broad  salt  marshes,  through 
which  tide-channels  run,  but  which  embrace 
considerable  areas  that  lie  above  all  but  the 
very  high  spring  tides,  and  which  are  mostly 
covered  by  a  dense  growth  of  a  low,  fleshy- 
leaved  plant  called  samphire  or  pickle-weed 
(. Salicornia ).  Here  and  there,  however,  in 
these  areas  there  are  small,  entirely  bare, 
level  sandy  places  which  shine  white  and 
sparkling  in  the  sun  because  of  a  thin  in¬ 
crustation  of  salt  over  them. 

Each  September  these  bare  places  are  tak¬ 
en  possession  of  by  many  female  wasps  of  a 
species  of  Ammophila,  which  is  a  long,  slen¬ 
der-bodied  “solitary”  or  “digger”  wasp,  that 
is  somewhat  gregarious  in  habit,  but  is  not 
at  all  a  “social”  wasp  like  the  hornets  and 
yellow-jackets,  the  Vesjpas ,  more  familiar  to 
us.  Now,  watching  closely  any  one  of  these 
female  Ammophilas  flitting  about  these  bare 
places  one  can  see  the  following  performance 
take  place. 

First,  the  Ammophila,  after  various 
flights — flights  of  survey,  we  may  call  them 


[  i  ] 


2 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


— over  the  salt-encrusted  ground,  will  settle 
down  somewhere  on  it,  and,  with  her  sharp 
jaws,  cut  out  a  small  circular  bit  of  the  salty 
soil  crust,  which  she  gets  out  unbroken,  and 
drags  off  a  few  inches  to  one  side.  Then  she 
digs  out,  by  means  of  her  jaws,  bit  by  bit,  a 
little  vertical  well  about  three  inches  deep 
and  slightly  less  in  diameter  than  the  circu¬ 
lar  bit  of  salt  crust.  Each  pellet  of  soil  dug 
out  is  carried  away  by  the  wasp,  flying  a 
foot  or  two  from  the  mouth  of  the  hole  in 
any  direction,  and  dropped.  She  does  not 
plan  to  have  any  tell-tale  pile  of  soil  near 
the  mouth  of  that  precious  hole  in  the 
ground.  In  emerging  from  the  hole  she  al¬ 
ways  backs  upward  out  of  it,  and  while  dig¬ 
ging  she  keeps  up  a  low  humming  sound. 
We  might  imagine  this  to  be  the  joyous  song 
of  the  home-making  mother — but  as  we  are 
scientific  observers  we  had  better  restrain, 
if  not  our  imagination,  at  least  our  unverifi- 
able  interpretation  of  things.  Let  us  be  prop¬ 
erly  matter  of  fact. 

After  the  hole  is  about  three  inches  deep 
our  energetic  Ammophila,  climbing  out  with 
the  last  pellet  and  flinging  it  to  one  side, 
seeks  for  and  finds  the  little  circular  bit  of 
salt  encrustation  which  was  so  carefully  re¬ 
moved  and  put  to  one  side  at  the  beginning 
of  this  hole-making  performance.  This  she 


INSTINCT  MIND  OF  AMMOPHILA  3 

now  drags  to  the  hole  and  with  it  carefully 
covers  the  hole’s  mouth.  Then  she  flies  away 
over  the  surrounding  pickle-weed  and  dis¬ 
appears  in  it. 

We  must  wait  a  few  minutes  now,  some¬ 
times  only  a  few,  sometimes  as  many  as  fif¬ 
teen  or  twenty.  If  we  like,  we  can  look 
around  us  in  the  little  bare  space  and  we 
shall  see  other  Ammophilas  digging  holes, 
going  in  head  first  and  backing  out,  flipping 
pellets  of  soil  away,  humming  their  nest¬ 
building  songs  and  altogether  doing  just 
what  our  first  Ammophila  did  and  in  just 
the  same  way.  But  now,  silence  and  immov¬ 
ability!  For  the  first  Ammophila  is  coming 
back,  flying  low  and  heavily  with  what 
seems  to  be  a  dead  looper  or  inch-worm 
(larva  of  a  Geometrid  moth)  about  an  inch 
and  a  quarter  long,  held  in  her  jaws.  She 
comes  directly  to  the  covered  hole; — how 
does  she  tell  where  it  is,  with  its  salt-crust 
cover  making  it  look  like  all  the  rest  of  the 
ground? — puts  the  limp  inch  worm  down  by 
it,  carefully  removes  the  salt-crust  cover, 
and  then  drags  the  inch  worm  down  into  the 
hole,  going  in  head  first  and  then  coming  up 
and  out  backwards.  Then  she  re-covers  the 
hole  with  the  salt-crust  lid,  and  flies  away 
again.  After  a  while  she  is  back  with  another 
limp  inch  worm  which  she  puts  into  the  hole, 


4 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


going  through  just  the  same  performance  as 
she  did  the  first  time.  And  so  on  until  she 
has  put  in  five  inch  worms.  If  we  watch  other 
Ammophila  mothers  we  shall  see  that  they 
vary  a  little  in  number  of  inchworms  put 
into  their  holes.  The  number  runs  from  five 
to  eight,  or  rarely,  ten,  but  is  usually  five 
or  six. 

Now,  what  next?  After  taking  the  fifth 
inchworm  down  into  the  hole  Ammophila 
does  not  come  out  as  soon  as  she  has  after 
putting  each  of  the  others  down.  After  sev¬ 
eral  minutes,  however,  she  does  come  out, 
but  instead  of  flying  away  she  now  begins 
to  fill  the  hole  with  pellets  of  soil  which  she 
scrapes  up  here  and  there  with  her  sharp 
strong  jaws.  Some  of  the  pellets  are  the  ones 
she  scattered  a  foot  or  two  away  while  she 
was  digging  the  hole.  If  they  are  close  by  she 
scrapes  them  in  with  her  forefeet.  If  farther 
away  she  brings  them  in  her  jaws.  She  works 
rapidly,  running  and  jumping  about,  mak¬ 
ing  little  buzzing  leaps  and  flights,  until  she 
has  quite  filled  the  hole. 

Then  she  does  a  clever  thing.  With  her 
forefeet  she  paws  and  rakes  the  surface  of 
the  filled  hole  until  it  is  quite  smooth,  and 
then  with  jaws  and  horny  head  she  presses 
and  tamps  down  the  bits  of  soil  on  top  until 
they  are  a  little  below  the  surface  of  the  salt 


INSTINCT  MIND  OF  AMMOPIIILA  5 

crust  around  the  hole.  Finally  she  gets  again 
the  circular  salt-crust  lid  and  neatly  puts  it 
into  the  depression  on  top  of  the  filled-in 
hole  so  that  it  fits  perfectly  with  the  hard 
continuous  salt  crust  around  the  hole’s  edge ! 
Without  saying  anything  about  intention 
on  the  part  of  Ammophila,  it  is  certain  that 
by  this  performance  she  has  almost  perfect¬ 
ly  concealed  the  whereabouts  of  the  hole.  In 
fact,  if  we  take  our  eyes  off  it  we  shall  have 
difficulty  in  finding  it  again:  and  yet  we 
know,  to  start  with,  just  where  it  is.  How 
about  the  various  predaceous  birds  or  in¬ 
sects  who  would  like  to  find  it  with  its  store 
of  luscious  inch  worms? 

And  now  Ammophila  is  finished  with  this 
hole,  at  least.  But  we  are  not.  Let  us  dig  it 
up  and  have  a  look  at  those  apparently  dead 
inchworms,  and  also  see  if  we  can  find  out 
what  kept  Ammophila  so  long  in  the  hole 
after  taking  down  the  fifth  worm.  So  we  dig 
up  and  examine  the  five  inchworms.  Stick¬ 
ing  to  the  body  of  the  last  one  put  in  there  is 
a  little,  shining,  white,  seed-like  thing.  It  is 
an  egg  which  Ammophila  has  laid  and  glued 
on  to  the  worm’s  body.  And  the  worms 
themselves  instead  of  being  dead  are  alive 
but  paralyzed.  If  we  prick  any  one  of  them 
near  head  or  tail  it  will  wriggle  just  a  little. 
If  we  prick  one  in  the  middle  of  the  body  it 


6 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


does  not  wriggle.  Ammophila  has  stung  each 
inch  worm  in  one  or  more  of  the  middle  tiny 
ganglia  or  body-brains  which  are  ranged 
segmentally  along  the  under  side  of  the 
body ;  a  very  exact  and  useful  surgical  oper¬ 
ation.  For  the  worms,  which  are,  of  course, 
to  serve  as  food  for  the  Ammophila  grub 
that  will  hatch  from  the  single  egg,  if  dead 
would  soon  decay  and  be  useless  to  the  grub, 
and  if  not  paralyzed  would  promptly  dig 
their  way  up  and  out  of  the  hole  before  the 
egg  even  hatched.  So  down  in  the  darkness 
of  the  filled-in  hole  there  will  soon  begin  the 
tragic  eating  alive  of  the  worms  by  the  Am¬ 
mophila  grub  which  soon  hatches  from  the 
egg  and  which  will  find  in  the  inchworms 
enough  food  to  last  it  until  time  to  pupate, 
when  it  takes  no  more  food.  Then,  later,  it 
will  issue  as  a  full-fledged  new  Ammophila, 
to  dig  its  way  out  and  find  another  and 
mate,  and,  if  a  female,  go  through  this  same 
performance  next  September.  And  it  will  do 
all  this  without  ever  being  taught  by  its 
mother  or  any  other  Ammophila.  In  fact  it 
will  never  see  its  mother  or  father,  nor  will 
they  ever  see  it. 

This  may  not  be  a  wholly  new  story  for 
those  who  have  read  Fabre  or  our  own  Peck- 
hams  and  others  who  have  watched  and  de¬ 
scribed  the  similar  performances  of  other 


INSTINCT  MIND  OF  AMMOPHILA  7 


kinds  of  solitary  wasps.  Many  people  know 
from  reading  these  other  stories  that  differ¬ 
ent  varieties  of  solitary  wasps  use  different 
kinds  of  insects  to  store  their  egg  burrows 
with;  some  use  crickets,  some  use  flies,  some 
use  spiders,  and  so  on,  but  each  kind  or 
species  of  wasp  always  uses  a  particular 
kind,  or  closely  related  kinds,  of  other  insects 
or  spiders  to  supply  its  never-to-be-seen 
children  with  living  animal  food.  Even  the 
great  hairy  Mygales,  or  tarantulas  of  Cal¬ 
ifornia,  are  stung,  paralyzed  and  stored  in 
the  egg-burrows  of  Pepsis,  the  glittering 
armored  giant  wasp  called  Tarantula-killer. 

I  have  described  the  smoothing  off  and 
tamping  down  by  Ammophila,  with  jaws 
and  head,  of  the  filled-in  hole.  But  Williston 
in  Kansas  and  the  Peckhams  in  Wisconsin 
have  seen  other  Ammophilas  hunt  about 
for  and  find  and  pick  up  in  their  forefeet  a 
smooth  little  pebble  and  use  it  as  a  tool  for 
this  smoothing  and  tamping.  This  may  seem 
incredible  to  many  humans — so  sure  are  we 
that  we  are  the  only  tool-users.  But  doth 
Williston  and  Peckham  pass  among  biolo¬ 
gists  as  truth-tellers.  Williston,  indeed,  was 
afraid  to  tell  of  his  observations  for  some 
time  after  making  them.  It  was  soon  after 
the  time  of  Theodore  Roosevelt’s  valiant 
charge  on  the  nature  fakers! 


8 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


We  have  spent  a  good  deal  of  time  with 
Ammophila,  but  I  want  to  make  one  story 
of  instinct  do  as  an  example  of  the  stories  of 
all  instinct-minds.  Hence  I  have  told  the 
story  in  some  detail.  We  have  now  only  to 
note  certain  particular  conditions  that  per¬ 
tain  to  the  animals  that  have,  and  live  suc¬ 
cessfully  by  exercising,  such  instinct-minds. 

In  the  first  place,  although  Ammophila’s 
egg-laying  and  food-providing  performance 
is  very  elaborate  and  seems  very  clever,  it 
is  about  the  only  elaborate  performance  she 
does  in  her  whole  life.  Most  of  the  rest  of 
Ammophila’s  activity  in  life  is  to  avoid  as 
well  as  she  can  by  good  flying,  and  a  use  of 
her  sting,  the  various  predaceous  birds,  liz¬ 
ards,  toads,  or  large  insects  that  would  like 
to  catch  and  eat  her,  and  to  hunt  about  for 
some  food  for  herself,  which  isn’t  difficult, 
as  she,  and  all  other  wasps,  are  almost  om¬ 
nivorous;  practically  anything  in  the  way 
of  animal  food  as  well  as  various  kinds  of 
vegetable  food  will  do.  In  the  second  place, 
we  can  find  by  a  little  experimenting  that 
even  in  the  accomplishment  of  her  elaborate 
and  wonder-compelling  egg-laying  and  food¬ 
providing  performance  there  is  a  quickly- 
reached  limit  to  her  cleverness. 

Suppose  we  interrupt  Ammophila  in  her 
clever  performance  and  give  her  a  few  difli- 


INSTINCT  MIND  OF  AMMOPHILA  9 

culties,  very  slight  difficulties,  to  overcome. 
That  happens  to  us  almost  every  day.  It  is, 
indeed,  under  such  conditions  especially  that 
our  mind  shows  its  capacities.  Of  course, 
there  are,  as  declared  at  the  very  beginning 
of  this  discussion,  different  kinds  of  human 
minds,  and  so  we  respond  to  the  calls  put 
on  our  minds  with  different  degrees  of  suc¬ 
cess,  or  even  with  no  success  at  all.  We  may 
be  feeble-minded  or  moron  or  we  may  have 
an  average  mind  or  a  mind  of  much  talent 
or  even  of  genius.  We  shall  have  later  to  dis¬ 
cuss  these  differences.  But  we  need  only 
recognize  now  that  unless  we  are  really  fee¬ 
ble-minded  or  moron,  the  introduction  of 
interruptions  or  special  difficulties  in  our 
undertakings  only  gives  our  mind  a  special 
chance  to  win  new  triumphs. 

But  not  so  with  Ammophila.  Interrupt 
her  chain  of  activities  in  the  nest  making 
and  provisioning  performance  and  she  is 
lost.  If,  for  example,  we  quietly  remove  one 
of  the  inchworms,  after  she  has  brought  it 
and  laid  it  on  the  ground  near  the  nest,  and 
place  it  a  few  inches  farther  away  while  she 
is  engaged  in  getting  the  salt-crust  cover  off 
of  the  hole,  what  happens?  When  she  turns 
about  to  seize  the  worm  to  drag  it  down  into 
the  hole  and  does  not  find  it  just  where  she 
placed  it,  she  is  nonplussed.  She  moves 


10 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


about  distractedly.  She  doesn’t  search.  She 
simply  flutters  about,  perhaps  happening 
by  chance  on  the  worm;  perhaps  not.  She 
doesn’t  seem  to  use  her  powers  of  sight  and 
smell,  which  she  has  certainly  used  in  find¬ 
ing  the  same  inchworm  in  the  pickle-weed, 
to  find  the  nearby  worm  now  on  the  ground 
in  plain  sight  or  smell  of  her.  So  if  she  doesn’t 
happen  to  find  it  promptly  by  chance  she 
simply  gives  up  further  work  on  this  bur¬ 
row.  If  she  goes  on  with  her  nest-making  at 
all  she  starts  a  new  hole.  In  other  words,  she 
starts  the  chain  of  performance  all  over 
again  from  the  beginning.  Fabre  found  in 
the  case  of  another  kind  of  solitary  wasp 
which  stores  its  burrow  with  individuals  of 
a  certain  kind  of  wingless  ground  cricket, 
that  if  he  merely  turned  around  one  of  these 
crickets  brought  by  the  wasp  to  the  side  of 
the  hole,  and  which  she  deposited  with  the 
long  hind  legs  nearest  the  hole  so  that  she 
always  seized  the  cricket  by  these  legs  pre¬ 
paratory  to  dragging  it  down,  that  the  wasp 
failed  to  put  the  cricket  in  the  hole  although 
the  antennae  projecting  from  the  head, 
which  was  now  nearest  the  hole,  were  about 
as  good  handles  to  seize  it  by  as  the  legs. 

We  get  an  enlightening  idea  from  this. 
This  wonderful  and  apparently  most  sen¬ 
sible  and  even  reasoned  performance  of  bur- 


INSTINCT  MIND  OF  AMMOPHILA  11 

row-building  and  provisioning  is  obviously 
a  series  of  separate  but  connected  successive 
performances,  each  single  act  being  the  nec¬ 
essary  stimulus  for  the  next  in  the  chain, 
the  whole  chain  being  started  by  the  stimu¬ 
lus  of  egg-production  in  the  body  and  all  of 
it  possible  to  the  Ammophila  by  inherited 
endowment  without  any  learning.  And  it  is 
as  possible  to  any  one  female  Ammophila  as 
to  another.  There  seems  to  be  no,  or  at  best 
but  little,  possibility  of  variation  in  the  per¬ 
formance.  We  humans  go  about  making  our 
nests  and  caring  for  our  young  in  a  great 
variety  of  ways,  all  alike  in  general,  but  al¬ 
most  all  specifically  different.  Not  so  with 
Ammophila.  All  the  mothers  of  this  kind  or 
species  of  solitary  wasp  do  their  nest-build¬ 
ing  in  almost  exactly  the  same  way.  Simi¬ 
larly  with  each  other  kind  of  solitary  wasp. 
The  performance  must  go  on  uninterrupt¬ 
edly  and  uniformly.  There  is  no  adaptabil¬ 
ity,  no  meeting  of  emergencies,  no  choice  of 
ways.  Fabre  stresses  especially  this  lack  of 
variation  in  performance.  The  Peckhams, 
quite  as  reliable  observers — although  not 
such  gifted  writers  and  hence  not  so  well 
known — do  find  some  variation  in  the  be¬ 
havior  of  individual  wasps  of  the  same  spe¬ 
cies,  enough,  at  least,  to  offer  bases  for  a 
progressive  modification  of  the  whole  be- 


12 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


havior  if  these  variations  can  in  some  way  be 
selected  and  established  as  a  general  species 
endowment.  But  these  variations  are  slight. 

Now,  we  are  at  once  led  to  ask,  what  are 
the  particular  influences  that  have  deter¬ 
mined  the  separate  identical  acts  that  go  to 
make  up  this  chain  of  performance  carried 
out  so  nearly  uniformly  by  all  Ammophila 
females  of  the  same  species?  I  know  of  no 
analysis  aimed  at  elucidating  this  in  the  case 
of  Ammophila’s  nest-making  performance, 
but  I  have  attempted  such  an  analysis,  by 
experimentation,  in  the  case  of  two  other 
important  instinctive  performances  by  in¬ 
sects;  first,  that  of  the  swarming  of  honey 
bees  from  their  hive,  and,  second,  that  of 
mating  and  egg-laying  by  silkworm  moths. 
Let  me  briefly  refer  to  these  observations 
by  way  of  introducing  a  brief  discussion  of 
another  type  of  “mind”  that  may  be  looked 
on  perhaps  as  a  simpler  type  than  the  in¬ 
stinct  mind,  but  which  may  even  better  be 
looked  on  as  the  instinct  mind  in  a  forma¬ 
tive  stage.  This  is  the  mind,  or  behavior 
control,  which  depends  on  obvious  and  in¬ 
evitable  mechanical  reactions  to  specific 
physico-chemical  stimuli  either  internal  or 
external  to  the  body  of  the  organism.  These 
reactions  have,  however,  been  observed 
chiefly  as  responses  to  external  stimuli. 


REFLEXES  OF  HONEY-BEES 
AND  SILKWORM  MOTHS 


One  of  the  many  striking  performances 
in  the  instinctive  behavior  of  honey¬ 
bees  is  that  of  the  “swarming”  out  of  the 
hive,  after  a  new  queen  has  emerged  from 
her  special  pear-shaped  cell,  of  either  the 
new  queen,  or  the  old  one,  together  with  a 
large  number,  running  up  to  ten  thousand 
or  even  more,  of  the  workers  of  the  hive. 
This  performance  accomplishes  two  things; 
first,  it  relieves  the  hive  of  congestion,  for 
it  occurs  usually  at  times  of  abundant  food 
supply  and  when  the  old  queen  is  laying 
eggs  and  new  workers  and  drones  are  being 
produced  in  largest  numbers;  and,  second, 
it  distributes  the  species,  as  new  honey-bee 
communities,  unlike  new  social  wasp  or 
bumble-bee  communities,  are  founded  only 
in  this  way,  (except  of  course  by  certain  arti¬ 
ficial  methods  of  bee-handlers). 

When  it  is  time  for  the  new  queen  to  be 
born,  that  is,  to  issue  full-fledged  from  the 
cell  in  which  she  has  until  now  passed  all  her 
developing  life  as  egg,  larva  and  pupa,  there 
is  great  excitement  in  the  hive.  The  varied 
tasks  of  the  worker  bees  of  pollen-  and  nec¬ 
tar-gathering,  comb-building,  larva-feeding, 
cleaning,  ventilating,  etc.,  mostly  cease,  and 

[  13  ] 


14 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


a  great  crowd  of  bees  gathers  about  the 
queen  cell,  from  which  is  heard  the  chal¬ 
lenging  piping  of  the  new  queen  ready  to 
issue,  answered  by  loud  trumpeting  from 
the  old  queen  outside.  Then  the  slender¬ 
bodied  virgin  new  queen  emerges.  Some¬ 
times  the  workers — following,  we  may  say 
as  long  as  we  know  no  better  explanation, 
Maeterlinck’s  “spirit  of  the  hive” — prevent 
her  issuance  for  some  time,  or,  allowing  her 
to  issue,  suffocate  her  by  imprisoning  her 
in  a  dense  mass  of  bees,  “balling”  as  it  is 
called.  More  usually,  however,  they  permit 
her  to  issue,  unhindered  and  unharmed,  and 
then  she  and  the  old  queen  fight  to  the  death 
for  the  queenship  of  the  hive,  or  one  of 
them  emerges  from  the  hive  exit  accompa¬ 
nied  by  a  great  number  of  excited  workers. 
This  is  “swarming.” 

Over  a  glass-sided  and  glass-topped  ob¬ 
servation  hive  in  my  laboratory,  with  its 
exit  leading  by  a  short  glass-covered  tunnel 
to  a  hole  cut  in  a  window  casing,  I  kept  a 
black  cloth  cover  which  could  be  easily  and 
quickly  removed  whenever  I  wanted  to  see 
what  was  going  on  in  the  hive.  At  a  time  of 
the  birth  of  a  new  queen,  readily  indicated 
to  me,  although  the  black  cloth  cover  was 
on  the  hive,  by  the  sounds  of  the  royal  trum- 
petings  and  the  loud  buzzing  of  the  excited 


REFLEXES  OF  HONEY-BEES  15 

workers,  I  suddenly  lifted  the  black  cloth 
just  as  the  swarm  was  on  the  point  of  issu¬ 
ing  from  the  hive.  Strangely  enough  the 
swarming  out  was  immediately  arrested, 
and  those  bees  about  to  issue  all  turned  and 
made  rapidly  for  the  top  of  the  hive.  They 
simply  flowed  up  the  glass  sides  in  an  amber 
stream  to  jam  themselves  tight  against  the 
glass  top.  And  there  they  remained  excited¬ 
ly  as  long  as  the  cloth  cover  was  off.  But 
when  I  replaced  the  cover,  slipping  it  on 
slowly  from  above  down,  this  stream  of  bees 
promptly  flowed  back  down  the  sides  and 
when  the  cover  was  all  on,  started  flowing 
out  to  the  exit  through  the  short  glass- 
topped  tunnel.  Again  I  lifted  the  cover  off 
and  again  the  excited  bees  turned  and 
flowed  upward. 

Now,  let  us  realize  that  the  only  light 
which  entered  the  hive  when  the  black  cloth 
cover  was  on  came  in  through  the  small  en¬ 
trance-exit  opening,  but  when  the  cover 
was  off  much  more  light  came  in  through 
the  glass  top,  the  hive  being  at  the  bottom 
of  the  window.  With  this  in  mind,  some  fur¬ 
ther  experimenting  clearly  revealed  that  al¬ 
though  the  bees  in  normal  times  went  unin¬ 
terruptedly  on  their  foraging  trips  out  and 
in  through  the  entrance  exit  opening,  wheth¬ 
er  the  black  cloth  cover  was  on  the  hive  or 


16 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


off  of  it,  that  is,  whether  the  light  came 
from  below  or  above,  at  the  special  time  of 
swarming  the  bees  went  in  that  direction, 
whatever  it  was,  from  which  came  the  most 
light.  They  became  at  this  time,  to  use  the 
technical  language  of  the  mechanist  ex¬ 
plainers  of  animal  behavior  on  a  physico¬ 
chemical  basis,  strongly  positively  photo¬ 
tropic.  (There  is  one  weak  point  in  this  ex¬ 
planation,  that  probably  may  have  been  al¬ 
ready  noted.  Why  do  not  all  of  the  bees  in 
the  hive,  instead  of  only  ten  thousand  or  so, 
issue  from  the  hive,  if  a  strong  positive 
phototropism  develops  among  all  of  them 
at  the  time  of  the  appearance  of  a  new 
queen.  And  if  not  among  all  of  them,  why  or 
how  among  a  particular  ten  thousand?) 

Swarming  may  be  called  an  instinct;  we 
usually  so  call  it.  But  certainly  it  is  true 
that  I  could  permit  or  prevent  this  swarm¬ 
ing,  not  by  any  such  brutal  proceeding  as 
opening  or  closing  the  exit  of  the  hive,  but 
merely  by  determining  the  direction  from 
which  came  the  strongest  light.  The  posi¬ 
tive  and  essential  act  of  swarming  thus  re¬ 
solves  itself  into  a  simple  reflex  or  mere  trop- 
ism,  a  direct  and  inevitable  reaction  to  an 
external  physico-chemical  stimulus,  namely, 
light. 

The  Chinese  silkworm  moths  issue  from 


REFLEXES  OF  HONEY-BEES  17 


their  cocoon-covered,  pupal  cases  as  full- 
fledged  insects,  sexually  mature.  They  have 
four  wings,  but  cannot  fly,  or  can  only  in 
exceptional  cases,  and  then  for  but  a  few 
feet  or  yards.  They  take  no  food;  indeed 
they  cannot  feed,  for  their  mouth-parts  are 
atropied.  They  have  done  their  eating,  and 
plenty  of  it,  as  larvae  (silkworms) .  They  take 
enough  food  then,  not  only  to  provide  ener¬ 
gy  for  their  six  or  seven  weeks  of  active  lar¬ 
val  life,  but  to  store  up  food  in  the  body, 
mostly  as  fat,  to  provide  for  their  inactive 
pupal  life  of  twelve  to  fourteen  days  and 
their  active  life  as  moths,  which  lasts,  how¬ 
ever,  only  a  few  days,  usually  not  more  than 
a  week.  Having  no  need,  or  even  means,  of 
feeding;  having  no  bird  or  toad  or  lizard  or 
insect  enemies  to  avoid,  because  they  are 
entirely  protected,  as  their  ancestors  have 
been  for  the  past  five  thousand  years,  by 
the  silk-growers;  and  the  males  not  having 
to  search  widely  for  their  female  mates 
which  issue  from  cocoons  within  a  few  inches 
of  them ;  and  these  females,  once  mated,  not 
needing  to  search  for  a  particular  food-plant 
on  which  to  deposit  their  eggs,  as  most 
moths  and  butterflies  do,  so  that  the  hatch¬ 
ing  larvae  will  find  proper  food  ready  to 
mouth;  without  having,  thus,  to  do  any  of 
these  various  things  usually  necessary  for 


18 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


moths  to  do,  the  silkworm  moths  have  just 
two  essential  activities  to  achieve,  namely, 
mating  and  egg-laying. 

Here,  then,  we  have  a  highly  developed 
insect,  of  different  order,  but  of  little  less 
structural  specialization  than  the  solitary 
wasps  and  honey-bees,  whose  behavior, 
however,  is  extremely  limited  and  very  sim¬ 
ple,  although  no  less  important  to  the  per¬ 
sistence  of  its  own  species  than  the  elabo¬ 
rate  behavior  of  the  bees  and  wasps  is  to  the 
maintenance  of  theirs.  Under  these  advan¬ 
tageous  circumstances  perhaps  we  can  dis¬ 
cover,  as  we  did  in  the  case  of  the  swarming 
of  the  honey-bees,  an  explanation,  or  better 
put,  a  description,  of  the  behavior  of  the 
silkworm  moths  in  terms  of  definitive  re¬ 
sponse  to  physico-chemical  stimuli;  in  other 
words,  a  mechanistic  explanation  or  de¬ 
scription. 

After  the  female  moths  issue  from  their 
cocoons,  with  bodies  already  heavy  and 
swollen  because  of  the  mass  of  eggs  in  them, 
they  move  about  but  little  and  only  slowly. 
The  males,  on  the  other  hand,  of  more  slen¬ 
der  and  lighter  body,  are  active  and  restless 
in  their  movements,  which  soon  culminate 
in  bringing  them  to  the  females.  Now,  these 
movements  might  be  described  as  resulting 
from  an  intention  to  find  the  females,  if  we 


REFLEXES  OF  HONEY-BEES  19 

cared  to  ascribe  the  power  of  conscious  in¬ 
tention  to  these  creatures;  or  as  an  instinc¬ 
tive  search  for  their  mates,  if  we  preferred 
to  explain  their  behavior  as  controlled  by 
unconscious  instinct.  But  if  we  go  further  in 
our  observation,  and  add  a  little  experimen¬ 
tation  to  it,  we  shall  find  basis  for  a  third 
kind  of  description. 

The  females  bear,  in  the  posterior  end  of 
the  abdomen,  a  pair  of  scent  glands  which 
are  occasionally,  and  in  some  cases  continu¬ 
ously,  protruded  from  the  body.  The  males 
have  organs  of  smell — many  minute  pits 
with  a  free  nerve-ending  at  the  base  of  each 
— on  their  antennae.  They  smell  the  odor 
from  the  female  scent-glands ;  or,  put  as  the 
mechanists  would  put  it,  the  scent  parti¬ 
cles  proceeding  through  the  air  from  these 
glands  strike  and  stimulate  these  nerve- 
endings;  which  in  turn  results  in  a  positive 
stimulation  of  the  males  to  move  in  the  di¬ 
rection  of  the  source  of  the  scent  particles. 
This  brings  them  to  the  females.  They  do 
not  find  the  females  by  sight,  for  they  find 
them  in  darkness  as  well  as  in  day  time  and 
with  their  eyes  totally  blinded  as  well  as 
with  their  eyes  untreated.  If  one  antenna  of 
a  male  moth  standing  near  a  female  is  re¬ 
moved,  the  movements  of  this  male  will  con¬ 
stitute  a  series  of  circles,  or  a  spiral,  turning 


20 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


always  toward  that  side  on  which  the  intact 
antenna  lies,  this  devious  movement,  how¬ 
ever,  also  usually  bringing  it  finally  to  the 
female.  Finally,  if  the  scent-glands  be  cut 
from  a  female,  and  a  male,  with  eyes  and 
antennae  intact,  be  put  equidistant  between 
the  female  moth  and  the  removed  glands, 
or  even  much  nearer  the  female  than  the 
glands,  the  male  will  inevitably  move  to¬ 
ward  the  glands  and  reaching  them  remain 
there  and  go  through  the  motions  of  an  at¬ 
tempt  at  mating.  It  doesn’t  distinguish  the 
difference  between  the  cut-out  glands  and 
the  female  moth,  and  it  thus  doesn’t  mate 
at  all.  The  male  silkworm  moth  is,  say  the 
mechanists,  positively  chemo-tropic :  its 
movements  are  simply  a  positive  and  inevi¬ 
table  physical  reaction  to  a  chemical  stimu¬ 
lus.  That  accounts  for  practically  all  of  the 
behavior  of  a  male  silkworm  moth  through 
all  of  its  adult  life. 

As  for  the  egg-laying.  Very  soon  after 
mating  the  female  begins  to  lay  its  eggs,  in 
small  batches,  until  all  of  the  300  or  more  in 
its  body  have  been  deposited.  This  is  of 
course  a  very  useful  performance;  it  is  a 
necessary  one  for  the  persistence  of  the 
species.  Does  the  female  moth  know  of  this 
usefulness,  this  necessity?  Or  is  egg-laying 
an  unconscious  performance  due  to  an  in- 


REFLEXES  OF  HONEY-BEES  21 


herited  instinct?  Or  can  it,  too,  be  seen  as  a 
positive  and  inevitable  result  of  a  mechani¬ 
cal  reaction  to  a  certain  specific  and  imme¬ 
diate  physico-chemical  stimulus?  If  the  ab¬ 
domen,  or  even  just  that  posterior  part  of  it 
containing  the  eggs,  is  cut  off  from  a  female 
moth,  thus  leaving  the  head,  with  brain, 
eyes  and  sense-organs  on  the  antennae,  and 
the  thorax  with  its  large  mid-body  ganglion, 
quite  separated  from  the  egg-laying  organs 
(ovaries,  ovi-ducts,  muscles)  with  the  small 
posterior  abdominal  ganglion  and  its  nerves 
which  run  from  the  skin  and  to  the  muscles 
of  the  hinder  part  of  the  abdomen,  this  cut¬ 
off  hinder  fraction  of  the  body,  if  its  ventral 
side  is  brought  in  contact  with  the  bottom 
of  the  tray  in  which  the  moths  are  kept,  or 
if  this  fragment  of  the  body  be  turned  over 
and  its  ventral  side  is  rubbed,  will  extrude 
the  eggs.  The  performance  of  egg-laying  will 
be  carried  on  just  as  it  would  be  by  an  un¬ 
mutilated  female.  In  other  words,  the  inter¬ 
esting  and  useful  egg-laying  behavior  of  the 
adult  female  moth — which  is  practically  all 
of  its  behavior  in  its  whole  adult  life — is, 
the  mechanists  would  say,  simply  an  inevit¬ 
able  physical  or  mechanical  reaction  by  a 
small  mass  of  living  substance  to  a  group  of 
physico-chemical  stimuli. 


OTHER  REFLEXES  AND 
TROPXSMS 


These  phenomena  are  exhibitions  of 
animal  behavior  governed  by  the  sim¬ 
plest  kind  of  mind,  the  mind  of  reflex  and 
tropism,  the  mind  of  mechanics,  of  physics 
and  chemistry,  a  mind,  or  behavior,  which 
is  merely  a  physico-chemical  property  of 
protoplasm.  When  we  go  lower  in  the  animal 
scale,  and  especially  when  we  go  to  the  very 
bottom  of  this  scale,  to  the  simplest  ani¬ 
mals  we  know,  the  unicellular  Protozoa,  we 
find  this  kind  of  behavior  being  more  and 
more  nearly  the  only  kind  of  behavior  ex¬ 
hibited.  We  find  these  simple  animals,  and 
the  simple  motile  unicellular  plants,  moving 
inevitably  toward  or  away  from  light  (posi¬ 
tive  or  negative  phototropism) ;  toward  or 
away  from  various  chemicals  (positive  or 
negative  chemo tropism) ;  in  or  opposite  to 
the  direction  of  the  pull  of  gravitation  (pos¬ 
itive  or  negative  geotropism);  in  contact 
with  or  avoiding  contact  with  solid  sub¬ 
stance  (positive  or  negative  stereotropism) ; 
and  so  on;  all  inevitable  physical  reactions 
to  physical  or  chemical  stimuli,  all  mechan¬ 
istic  behavior.  Or,  to  substitute  for  the  word 
behavior  the  name  of  that  which  presum¬ 
ably  governs  behavior,  namely,  mind  (in 

[  23  ] 


24 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


our  broad  use  of  the  word),  we  can  say  that 
among  the  lowest  animals  the  reflex  or  me¬ 
chanistic  mind  seems  to  be  the  only,  or  at 
least,  principal  kind  of  mind. 

But,  also,  we  have  found  that  an  analysis 
of  certain  examples  of  the  instinct  mind,  as 
exhibited  even  among  those  animals,  the  in¬ 
sects,  which  are  usually  referred  to  as  the 
group  in  which  the  instinct  mind  finds  its 
highest  development,  reveals  the  possibility 
of  seeing  in  instinct  only  a  highly  complex 
and  coordinated  chain  of  mechanical  re¬ 
flexes  determined  by  physico-chemical  stim¬ 
uli.  What  do  we  find  when  we  transfer  our 
scrutiny  from  the  lower  animals  to  the  high¬ 
er,  and  even  to  the  highest  animals,  our  own 
proud  selves,  in  our  attempt  to  recognize 
behavior  by  reflexes  or  tropisms? 

We  readily  enough  find  reflexes,  or  what 
we  call  reflexes,  in  the  higher  animals  and  in 
ourselves.  Such  are  the  unconscious  move¬ 
ments  and  general  behavior  of  our  internal 
organs,  the  beating  of  the  heart,  the  peris¬ 
taltic  movements  of  the  alimentary  canal, 
the  secretory  activities  of  glands,  the  con¬ 
traction  and  dilation  of  blood-vessels.  And 
while  the  particular  physical  or  chemical 
stimuli  that  set  up  the  behavior  of  these 
body  parts  are,  in  most  cases,  not  recog¬ 
nized  by  us,  yet  modern  experimental  physi- 


REFLEXES  AND  TROPISMS 


25 


ologists  have  revealed  some  of  them.  The 
swiftly  increasing  knowledge  that  we  have 
of  the  effects  of  the  secretions  of  the  duct¬ 
less  glands,  these  secretions  so  small  in 
quantity  but  of  such  strong  stimulating  or 
inhibiting  action,  has  opened  a  new  way  to 
the  understanding  of  the  physico-chemical 
control  of  much  of  the  functioning  of  differ¬ 
ent  body  tissues  and  organs. 

But  perhaps  most  forms  of  behavior  by 
the  body  or  its  parts  in  the  case  of  the  high¬ 
er  animals  and  ourselves  that  are  called 
reflexes  by  the  students  of  human  physiolo¬ 
gy  and  psychology  are  not  of  the  same  char¬ 
acter  as  the  reflex  and  tropismic  activities 
of  the  lower  animals,  although  the  mechan¬ 
ists  list  some  that  they  claim  to  be  the  same. 
Some  human  reflexes  are  undoubtedly  the 
result  of  long  repetition  of  originally  inten¬ 
tional  movements,  which  become  thus  a 
habit  of  the  individual  and  are  performed 
unconsciously  by  reflex  action  under  the  re¬ 
occurring  proper  circumstances.  But  such 
acquired  reflexes  are  not  inherited.  The  re¬ 
flexes,  on  the  contrary,  which  we  have  de¬ 
scribed  among  the  lower  animals,  as  well  as 
the  beating  of  our  heart,  the  winking  of  the 
eyes,  etc.,  are  a  part  of  the  inherited  endow¬ 
ment  of  the  species. 

Some  of  the  more  thorough-going  me- 


26 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


chanists  make  daring  claims  for  the  tropis- 
mic  control  of  the  most  complex  animal 
bodies,  even  our  own.  Once  wdien  one  of 
these  convinced  mechanists  saw  me,  on  en¬ 
tering  a  cafe  in  Leipzig,  find  a  seat  in  a  cor¬ 
ner  of  the  room  where  my  body  touched  the 
wall  on  either  side,  he  explained  to  me  my 
behavior  in  this  instance  as  an  example  of 
positive  stereotropism,  my  action  being 
such  as  to  give  my  body  as  much  contact  as 
possible  with  solid  substance — which  is  the 
same  explanation  he  would  give  for  the 
familiar  behavior  of  a  startled  sand  flea  in 
burrowing  into  the  sand.  I  was  to  him  sim¬ 
ply  a  positively  stereotropic  animal — and 
nothing  more. 

My  own  explanation  of  my  interesting 
behavior,  namely,  that  I  had  made  an  en¬ 
gagement  with  a  friend  some  hours  before 
to  meet  him  in  this  particular  corner  at  this 
particular  time  was  pleasantly  waved  aside. 
Why,  on  the  philosophic  principle  of  Oc¬ 
cam’s  Razor,  should  we  need  a  more  com¬ 
plex  or  specialized  explanation  when  a  sim¬ 
pler,  more  generalized  one  was  at  hand? 
However,  I  was  not  convinced  then,  nor  am 
I  yet,  that  the  springs  of  my  behavior  are 
to  be  as  easily  discovered  by  a  casual,  even 
though  a  trained,  observer,  as  those  of  a 
Paramoecium  or  a  sand-flea.  And  this,  if  for 


REFLEXES  AND  TROPISMS 


n 


no  other  reason  than  a  basis  of  our  common 
knowledge  of  the  power  of  the  human  being 
to  dislocate,  both  in  time  and  place,  many 
of  his  reactions  from  his  stimuli.  My  stimu¬ 
lus  and  my  reaction  may  be  days  apart  and 
miles  away  from  each  other. 

But  whether  those  forms  of  our  behavior 
that  the  physiologist  and  human  psycholo¬ 
gist  call  reflex  are,  or  are  not,  of  the  same 
type  as  the  “reflexes”  of  the  lower  animals, 
we  certainly  recognize  part  of  our  behavior 
as  instinctive  and  quite  of  the  type  of  the 
instinctive  behavior  of  Ammophila  and  of 
the  myriad  other  instinct-controlled  lower 
animals.  Our  instinctive  behavior,  indeed, 
is  of  so  much  importance  to  us  that  some  of 
it  is  actually  necessary  to  the  saving  and 
persistence  of  our  lives. 

Take  the  babe’s  act  of  suckling,  for  in¬ 
stance.  This  is  a  behavior  common  to  all  of 
us  individuals  of  the  human  species — just 
as  it  is  to  all  individuals  of  all  mammal  spe¬ 
cies — and  is  neither  taught  us  nor  learned 
from  individual  experience  but  is  something 
of  which  we  are  just  naturally  capable  from 
the  moment  of  birth ;  an  inherited  possession 
of  the  species.  That  puts  it  in  the  category 
of  instinct,  simon-pure  instinct. 

How  we  came,  as  species,  originally  to 
possess  this  capacity  of  instinctive  behav- 


28 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


ior,  or  how  Ammophila  came  to  possess  its 
much  more  complicated  nest-making  and 
food-providing  instinct,  is  a  great  question, 
the  conclusive  answer  to  which  the  biolo¬ 
gists,  genetic  psychologists  and  evolution¬ 
ists — or  even  the  mechanists — have  not  yet 
found.  Some  explain  it  by  natural  selection 
choosing  among  a  nearly  infinite  host  of 
spontaneous,  fortuitous  small  variations. 
We  do  know  that  these  variations  occur  but 
we  do  not  know  that  they  can  be  the  basis 
for  a  life-saving  or  life-losing  determination 
which,  together  with  their  heritability,  must 
necessarily  be  assumed  in  the  Darwinian 
natural  selection  explanation.  In  fact,  we 
know  that  many  of  these  variations  can  not 
fill  the  requirements  thus  made  of  them. 

The  mutationists  assume  fewer  but  larger 
spontaneous  variations  as  heritable,  and 
hence  larger  evolutionary  jumps,  but  they 
cannot  assume  that  these  jumps  will  be  in 
the  right  or  in  any  particular  direction,  for 
the  observed  mutations  do  not  bear  out 
this  assumption.  Same  trouble  for  the  Men¬ 
del  ians. 

The  Lamarckians,  or  contenders  for  the 
simple  and  highly  plausible  explanation  of 
evolution  by  the  inheritance  of  acquired 
characters,  face  what  has  so  far  been  the  in¬ 
superable  difficulty  of  proving  this  inheri- 


REFLEXES  AND  TROPISMS  29 

tance.  If  this  could  be  proved  their  theory 
would  beautifully  explain  much  of  evolu¬ 
tion,  especially  that  phase  of  it  called  adap¬ 
tation,  which  includes  instinct.  Unfortu¬ 
nately,  it  seems  much  easier  to  disprove 
than  to  prove  the  inheritance  of  acquired 
characters.  There  seems,  indeed,  to  be  no 
means  in  the  mechanism  of  inheritance  as 
we  now  so  far  know  it,  and  concerning 
which,  by  the  way,  more  has  been  learned 
in  the  last  half  century  than  in  all  time  be¬ 
fore,  to  make  it  possible.  This  general  diffi¬ 
culty,  or  impotence,  of  the  Lamarckians  ap¬ 
plies  disastrously  also  to  the  efforts  of  those 
genetic  psychologists  who  would  explain  in¬ 
stinct  as  inherited  habit,  that  is,  behavior 
originated  under  the  direction  of  intelli¬ 
gence,  then  repeated  so  often  as  to  become 
habit,  that  is,  capable  of  being  performed 
almost  or  quite  unconsciously,  and  then  fi¬ 
nally  become  a  matter  of  inheritance.  But 
this  explanation  implies,  first,  the  assump¬ 
tion  of  intelligence  in  very  low  animals,  and, 
second,  also,  that  fatal  assumption  of  the 
inheritance  of  acquirements. 

But  whether  we  can  find  or  not  a  reason¬ 
able  and  scientifically  well  supported  ex¬ 
planation  of  the  origin  and  development  of 
tropisms,  reflexes,  and  instincts,  we  know 
that  they  exist  and  that  hundreds  of  thou- 


30 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


sands  of  kinds  of  animals  have  minds  of 
these  kinds.  Compared  with  the  mammals, 
or  even  with  all  the  vertebrates,  to  whom 
may  be  attributed  minds  which,  in  lesser  or 
larger  degree,  include  the  elements  of  intel¬ 
ligence  and  reason,  the  animals  whose  minds 
are  wholly  or  almost  wholly  tropism,  reflex, 
and  instinct  minds,  are  as  thousands  to  tens. 
The  insects  alone  represent  more  than 
three-fourths  of  all  the  half  million  living 
kinds,  or  species,  of  animals  we  know. 
Looked  at,  then,  from  the  point  of  view  of 
numbers  of  animal  kinds  dominated  by  it, 
the  inherited  instinct  mind  is  easily  the 
prevailing  kind  of  mind.  What  a  curious 
impression  this  gives  us  of  animal  life! 


INTELLIGENCE  AND  REASON 


But  it  is  time  now  to  come  to  another 
general  type  or  kind  of  mind,  a  kind 
which  we  are  sure  we  possess,  and  claim  to 
possess  in  much  higher  degree  than  any 
other  animals,  and  of  which  we  are  very 
proud.  It  is  a  kind  with  which  we  are  much 
more  familiar  than  with  any  other  kind, 
and,  hence,  is  the  kind  we  usually  think  of 
when  we  think  of  mind  at  all.  It  is  the  mind 
of  intelligence  and  reason.  Perhaps  our 
whole  mind  includes  something  of  that  low, 
prosaic,  mechanistic  element  of  mind  which 
seems  alone  to  govern  the  lowest  animals, 
and  certainly  it  includes  something  of  that 
rigorous,  unadaptable,  non-educable  kind 
of  mind  characteristic  of  so  many  animals, 
that  we  call  instinct.  But  the  outstanding 
distinction  of  our  mind,  and  the  thing  about 
it  of  which  we  are  proud  and  prone  to  boast, 
is  its  inclusion  of  intelligence  and  reason. 
This  kind  of  mind  is  especially  character¬ 
ized  by  varying  in  capacity  among  the  dif¬ 
ferent  individuals  of  any  given  species  pos¬ 
sessing  it. 

There  are,  as  we  stated  in  almost  our  first 
sentence  in  this  discussion,  good  human 
minds  and  poor  ones,  minds  of  talent  or 

[  31  ] 


32  MIND  AND  HEREDITY 

genius  and  feeble  minds,  and  this  classifica¬ 
tion  is  based  on  the  varying  degrees  of  intel¬ 
ligence  and  reason  possessed  by  different  in¬ 
dividuals.  Even  in  the  poorest,  or  nearly 
poorest,  human  mind  there  is  some  intelli¬ 
gence.  And  that  seems  so  much  better  than 
to  have  only  a  reflex  mind  or  an  instinct 
mind!  Perhaps,  in  fact  almost  certainly, 
some  other  animals  have  a  mind  possessing 
some  intelligence.  Almost  any  of  us  are  in¬ 
clined  to  admit  this  when  we  recall  inci¬ 
dents  of  the  behavior  of  our  pet  dog,  cat, 
horse,  even  chicken  or  canary — I  have  a 
friend  with  a  pet  fish  which  is  “so  intelli¬ 
gent” — and  the  special  students  of  animal 
behavior  will  say  that  many  wild  animals 
have  intelligence,  as  will  also  the  nature- 
lovers  and  hunters  of  big  game  by  gun  or 
camera.  Mr.  Hornaday,  in  his  recent  book 
on  The  Mind  and  Manners  of  Wild  Animals, 
is  very  positive  that  many  animals — he  is 
thinking  almost  exclusively  of  vertebrates, 
and  mostly  of  mammals — have  intelligence 
and  some  of  them  much  intelligence.  Indeed 
he  says:  “Some  animals  have  more  intelli¬ 
gence  than  some  men;  and  some  have  far 
better  morals”  (p.  6).  Mr.  Hornaday,  who 
is  a  veteran  naturalist  and  present  director 
of  the  New  York  Zoological  Gardens  pre¬ 
sents  in  his  book  an  interesting  collection  of 


INTELLIGENCE  AND  REASON  33 

examples  of  intelligent  and  reasoned  be¬ 
havior  on  the  part  of  wild  animals  in  field, 
forest  and  zoological  gardens. 

As  an  illustration  of  the  intelligent  and 
apparently  reasoned  behavior  of  an  animal 
not  usually  accredited  with  too  much  intel¬ 
ligence,  namely  the  jack-rabbit,  I  may  draw 
on  my  own  observations  for  an  incident 
which  may  help  recall  to  many  of  you  other 
examples  from  your  own  observations  of 
the  intelligent  behavior  of  other  animals  to 
add  to  Mr.  Hornaday’s  already  long  list.  I 
may  remark  in  passing  that  one  always  feels 
surer  of  one’s  own  stories  about  animal  be¬ 
havior  than  of  those  of  other  persons.  There 
seems  to  be  a  general  atmosphere  of  sus¬ 
picion  hanging  about  most  “true  stories 
about  animals”  whether  told  by  the  old 
hunter  or  trapper  or  by  the  literary  pur- 
veyer  of  bed-time  stories  or  even  by  the 
professed  scientific  student  of  animal  be¬ 
havior  and  psychology. 

It  was  on  the  campus  of  Stanford  Univer¬ 
sity — an  unusually  generous  college  campus 
comprising,  as  it  does,  several  thousand 
acres  of  valley  and  low  foothills.  I  was  walk¬ 
ing  leisurely  across  an  open  field  on  this 
campus  given  over  at  that  time  mostly  to 
wild  poppies  and  a  few  towering  eucalyptus 
trees,  when  I  noted  the  approach,  at  some 


34 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


distance,  of  two  slender-bodied,  long  and 
thin-legged  coursing  hounds,  with  their 
trainer,  who  was  giving  them  an  airing  and 
some  gentle  exercise.  It  was  in  the  old  days 
when  the  brutal  sport  of  hare-coursing  was 
a  more  or  less  popular  addition  to  horse 
racing  in  California  as  an  excuse  for  stiff 
betting;  and  coursing  hounds  were  almost 
as  carefully  bred  and  trained  as  race-horses. 
These  hounds  could  run  just  a  little  faster 
than  jack-rabbits,  but  were  less  adroit  at 
dodging,  their  attempts  at  sudden  stopping 
or  change  of  direction,  when  at  high  speed, 
often  resulting  in  violent  falls  or  even  in 
breaking  their  legs.  In  that  advantage  lay 
the  principal  hope  of  any  jack-rabbit  once 
seen  and  under  pursuit  by  the  hounds  in 
open  country.  But  there  were  not  many 
chances  for  jack-rabbits  to  learn  of  this  ad¬ 
vantage  by  experience,  for  most  of  the  cours¬ 
ing  was  done  in  closed  fields  where  captured 
rabbits  were  turned  loose, — but  with  no 
chance  of  final  escape. 

At  the  moment,  almost,  of  my  seeing  the 
approaching  hounds,  still  some  distance 
away,  I  startled  a  jack-rabbit  from  its  rest¬ 
ing  place  just  in  front  of  me.  The  rabbit  be¬ 
gan  running  swiftly  straight  away  from  me 
toward  the  hounds,  of  which  it  was  evident¬ 
ly,  at  first,  unaware.  But  one  or  both  of  the 


INTELLIGENCE  AND  REASON  35 

dogs,  which  at  the  moment  were  some  dis¬ 
tance  apart,  jogging  along  on  parallel 
courses,  immediately  saw  the  rabbit,  and 
announcing  the  news  to  each  other — and  to 
the  rabbit — by  sharp  barks,  began  converg¬ 
ing  toward  the  rabbit  at  full  speed.  In  front, 
and  potentially  on  either  side  were  the 
hounds;  behind  was  I;  what  was  the  jack- 
rabbit  to  do? 

This,  at  any  rate,  is  what  it  did.  First  it 
made,  while  still  bearing  generally  forward 
at  full  speed,  two  or  three  hesitant,  tenta¬ 
tive  veerings,  first  to  one  side,  then  the 
other,  answered  at  once  by  responsive  veer¬ 
ings  of  the  hounds.  And  then,  as  the  dogs 
drew  nearer  on  their  converging  courses,  the 
rabbit  straightened  out  on  a  forward  line  at 
very  top  of  its  speed  and  passed  directly  be¬ 
tween  the  amazed  dogs,  both  of  which,  in 
endeavoring  to  make  the  nearly  right-angled 
turn  necessary  to  reach  and  seize  the  rabbit, 
lost  their  balance  and  rolled  over  and  over 
before  regaining  their  feet.  In  the  mean¬ 
time  Brother  Rabbit  had  got  a  good  lead, 
and  soon  rabbit  and  re-started  dogs  were 
disappearing  distantly  across  the  field. 

As  I  came  up  to  the  trainer,  standing 
stock  still  and  staring  after  his  disappearing 
hounds,  he  expressed  the  amazement  and 
the  appreciation  of  the  rabbit’s  perform- 


36 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


ance,  for  both  of  us,  by  a  single  sufficient 
phrase. 

“Well,  I’ll  be  damned,”  said  he. 

Along  with  this  I  may  refer  to  an  obser¬ 
vation  made  on  another  jack-rabbit  by  Dr. 
David  Starr  Jordan  of  Stanford,  which  he 
used  to  recount  to  his  students  of  evolution. 
I  give  the  story  in  Dr.  Jordan’s  own  words. 

“On  the  open  plains  of  Merced  County, 
California,  the  jack-rabbit  is  the  prey  of  the 
bald  eagle.  Not  long  since  a  rabbit  pursued 
by  an  eagle  was  seen  to  run  among  the  cat¬ 
tle.  Leaping  from  cow  to  cow,  he  used  these 
animals  as  a  shelter  from  the  savage  bird. 
When  the  pursuit  was  closer,  the  rabbit 
broke  cover  for  a  barbed-wire  fence.  When 
the  eagle  swooped  down  on  it,  the  rabbit 
moved  a  few  inches  to  the  right,  and  the 
eagle  could  not  reach  him  through  the  fence. 
When  the  eagle  came  down  on  the  other 
side,  he  moved  across  to  the  first.  And  this 
was  continued  until  the  eagle  gave  up  the 
chase.  It  is  instinct  that  leads  the  eagle  to 
swoop  on  the  rabbit.  It  is  instinct  again  for 
the  rabbit  to  run  away.  But  to  run  along  the 
line  of  a  barbed-wire  fence  demands  some 
degree  of  reason.  If  the  need  to  repeat  it 
arose  often  in  the  lifetime  of  a  single  rabbit 
it  would  become  a  habit.” 

It  is  not  my  intention,  however,  to  debate 


INTELLIGENCE  AND  REASON  37 

or  give  evidence  for  the  possession  of  intelli¬ 
gence  by  other  creatures  than  man.  The  pro¬ 
fessional  students  of  animal  psychology,  I 
believe,  generally  agree  that  various  ani¬ 
mals,  especially  the  so-called  higher  ones,  as 
the  mammals  and  birds  and  even  on  down 
among  the  vertebrates  through  the  reptiles 
and  batrachians  and  fishes,  do  have  minds 
which  exhibit,  in  varying  degrees,  intelli¬ 
gence  and  reason.  Nor  is  it  my  intention  to 
get  involved  in  the  difficult  subject  of  the 
genetic  relationships  of  the  different  kinds 
of  animal  mind;  that  is,  to  attack  the  prob¬ 
lem  of  which  is  genetically  lowest  or  oldest, 
and  which  genetically  highest  and  most  re¬ 
cent;  and,  also,  whether  these  kinds  of  mind 
can  be  arranged  serially  with  regard  to  their 
evolutionary  development.  We  shall  not  se¬ 
riously  attack  such  questions  as,  has  in¬ 
stinct  been  evolved  out  of  tropisms  and  re¬ 
flexes  and  intelligence  out  of  instinct,  or 
do  instinct  and  intelligence  represent  two 
branches  of  mental  evolution  from  a  single, 
early  ancestral  mental  status,  two  branches 
or  lines  of  mental  development  which  have 
gone  their  independent  ways,  reaching  pres¬ 
ent  culmination  in  the  insects  on  the  one 
hand  and  the  mammals  on  the  other. 

I  am  not  a  psychologist  and  these  are 
matters  primarily  for  the  professional  psy- 


38  MIND  AND  HEREDITY 

chologist.  My  excuse  for  daring  to  discuss 
the  subject  of  mind  at  all  is  that  there  are 
possible  special  angles  of  approach  to  the 
consideration  of  mind  fairly  open  to  the  gen¬ 
eral  biologist  and  to  the  biologist  especially 
interested  in  human  life.  This  kind,  or  these 
kinds,  of  biologist,  I  do  profess  to  be,  and 
hence  claim  the  privilege  of  considering  the 
phenomena  of  mind  from  those  particular 
angles  available  to  such  a  student. 

Among  these  is  that  very  important  one 
of  the  relative  roles  played  by  heredity  and 
environment  (including  function  or  exer¬ 
cise)  in  determining  the  kind  of  mind  in  each 
human  individual.  What  is  it  that  gives  me 
a  poor  mind  and  you  a  good  one;  that  makes 
a  genius  of  Einstein  and  a  moron  of  Zwei- 
stein?  Is  nature  more  potent  than  nurture, 
or  nurture  more  potent  than  nature,  in  the 
final  determination  for  each  of  us  of  the 
mind  we  have?  The  biologist  strenuously  in¬ 
sists  on  discarding  the  too  commonly  held 
point  of  view  of  the  antipathetical  relation 
of  heredity  and  environment.  These  two  po¬ 
tent  influences  in  the  determination  of  our 
fate  are  complements,  not  antitheses.  Both 
are  necessary  to  our  being  at  all ;  w^e  should 
be  nothing  with  either  alone.  But  the  rela¬ 
tive  complementary  roles  of  each  in  making 
us  what  we  are,  are  capable  of  some  meas- 


INTELLIGENCE  AND  REASON  39 

urable  distinction.  To  make  the  distinction 
between,  and  estimate  the  relative  poten¬ 
cies  of,  these  two  necessary  and  comple¬ 
mentary  influences  is  a  familiar  problem  to 
all  biologists  in  almost  all  biological  study. 
In  the  particular  case  we  have  immediately 
before  us  this  effort  is  essential  in  our  fever¬ 
ish  search  for  wisdom  to  guide  us  in  educa¬ 
tion,  in  social  organization,  in  civilization. 


- 


THE  INHERITANCE 
OF  MIND 

IN  our  scrutiny  and  brief  discussion  of  the 
instinct  mind  we  have  had  to  emphasize 
the  essentially  strictly  inherited  basis,  or, 
perhaps,  almost  inherited  totality,  of  this 
kind  of  mind.  All  the  individuals  of  a  given 
species  characterized  by  instinct  mind  have, 
essentially,  equally  capable  minds,  and 
these  minds  are  all  determined  as  to  charac¬ 
ter  and  capacity  at  birth;  little  or  nothing 
can  be  added  by  teaching  or  experience;  all 
of  the  mind  is  used  for  all  of  the  foreordained 
behavior  of  the  individual;  there  is  no  re¬ 
serve  to  be  drawn  on  for  emergencies.  But, 
after  all,  this  type  is  a  highly  successful 
mind  from  the  biologist’s  point  of  view; 
that  is,  it  is  a  mind  entirely  capable  of  carry¬ 
ing  its  owner,  or  enough  of  the  owners  of 
exactly  similar  minds,  through  life  up  to  and 
through  the  performance,  sometimes  highly 
elaborate,  of  all  that  behavior  involved  in 
providing  for  the  persistence  of  the  species. 
And  recall,  please,  that  this  all-inherited 
mind  is  that  kind  of  mind  by  far  the  most 
usual  in  the  whole  animal  kingdom;  that  is, 
is  that  kind  of  mind  possessed  by  far  the 
largest  number  of  kinds  of  living  animals. 

[  41  ] 


42 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


Now  whether  we  have  derived  our  kind 
of  mind  from  the  instinct  mind  or  not — and 
we  undoubtedly  have  not — we  have  never¬ 
theless  certainly  derived  our  body  and  its 
inherent  capacities,  physical  and  mental,  by 
slow  evolution  from  other  early  lower  kinds 
of  animals,  these  in  turn  having  been  them¬ 
selves,  body  and  mind,  derived  from  other 
earlier  and  still  lower  ones.  In  climbing  down 
this  genealogical  tree  we  do  not  get  very  far 
before  we  are  looking  ancestors  in  the  face 
whose  minds  were  determined  for  them 
practically  exclusively  by  heredity.  Is  it  sur¬ 
prising  then  that  along  with  the  determina¬ 
tion  of  much  of  our  bodily  character  and  ca¬ 
pacity  by  unquestioned  biological  inheri¬ 
tance,  we  should  find  our  mind,  a  function 
chiefly  of  our  physical  nervous  system,  also 
partly,  even  largely,  determined  in  its  char¬ 
acter  and  capacity  by  heredity?  The  won¬ 
der  is,  rather,  that  we  should  find  our  minds 
as  responsive  as  they  are  to  modification  by 
environmental  (which,  of  course,  includes 
educational)  influence.  Anyway,  we  shall 
find  it  not  difficult  to  prove  the  strong  po¬ 
tency  of  heredity  in  its  role  of  helping  to  de¬ 
termine  our  mental  make-up. 

Francis  Gallon,  cousin  of  Charles  Darwin, 
anthropologist, Traveler,  founder  of  biome¬ 
try  and  modern  eugenics  and  profound  stu- 


INHERITANCE  OF  MIND 


43 


dent  of  evolution  and  heredity,  was  the  first 
outstanding  scholar  to  call  serious  attention 
to  the  biological  inheritance  of  human  men¬ 
tal  traits  and  capacity.  Most  studies  in  hu¬ 
man  heredity  antecedent  to  his — and  his 
own  studies  were  made  less  than  sixty  years 
ago — were  confined  almost  exclusively  to 
the  inheritance  of  physical  characteristics. 
Gal  ton,  himself  an  excellent  example  of  the 
personal  advantage  which  comes  through 
being  derived  from  a  family  stock  in  which 
unusual  mental  capacity  has  been  a  conspic¬ 
uous  hereditary  feature,  studied  the  mental 
ability  of  Oxford  students  and  distinguished 
English  families.  He  found  that  the  correla¬ 
tion  between  Oxford  brothers  and  Oxford 
fathers  and  sons  as  regards  mental  ability 
was  much  greater  than  among  unrelated 
Oxonians.  He  found  mental  ability  running 
for  generations  in  English  families,  despite 
sufficient  dissimilarity  in  environment  and 
opportunity  among  successive  generations 
to  make  this  continuing  ability  not  explica¬ 
ble  by  environmental  advantage.  He  deter¬ 
mined  that  the  chance  of  a  son  of  an  emi¬ 
nent  man  to  show  eminent  ability  himself 
was  about  500  times  as  great  as  that  of  a  son 
of  a  man  taken  at  random.  His  observations 
and  conclusions  are  readily  accessible  in  his 
various  well-known  books  and  papers,  as 


44 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


Hereditary  Genius ,  English  Men  of  Science , 
their  Nature  and  Nurture ,  Human  Faculty 
and  Its  Development ,  Natural  Inheritance , 
and  others.  The  prestige  of  his  name,  his 
lucid  style  of  writing,  and  the  ingenious  and 
thorough  character  of  his  studies  combined 
to  give  the  results  of  his  work  a  wide  and 
convincing  hearing.  There  has  been  no  ques¬ 
tion,  since  his  work,  that  human  mental 
qualities  are  inherited  just  as  are  human 
physical  qualities.  There  had  been  much 
question  of  it  before  him. 

Galton,  however,  studied  heredity  statis¬ 
tically  and  his  determinations  of  inheritance 
behavior  are  expressed  as  averages.  With  re¬ 
gard  to  mental  inheritance  he  paid  less  at¬ 
tention  to  the  inheritance  of  particular  men¬ 
tal  traits  than  to  mental  capacity  as  a  whole. 
He  formulated  two  principal  generaliza¬ 
tions,  based  on  his  studies  of  both  mental 
and  physical  inheritance,  which  are  now 
commonly  known  as  “Galton’s  Laws.”  The 
first,  known  as  the  general  law  of  ancestral 
inheritance,  is  to  the  effect  that  an  individ¬ 
ual  derives  one-half  of  his  inheritance  from 
his  two  parents,  one-fourth  coming  from 
each ;  one-fourth  of  his  inheritance  from  his 
four  grandparents ;  one-eighth  from  his  eight 
great  grandparents ;  and  so  on  by  diminish¬ 
ing  fractions  until  the  sum  of  this  infinite 


INHERITANCE  OF  MIND 


45 


series  equals  1  or  the  total  inheritance  of  the 
individual.  Galton’s  second  generalization, 
called  the  law  of  filial  regression,  can  be 
summed  up  by  saying  that  the  children  of 
parents  who  vary  from  the  mean  of  the  pop¬ 
ulation  vary  similarly,  but  to  less  extent 
than  the  parents.  “This  law  of  regression,” 
says  Galton,  “tells  heavily  against  the  full 
hereditary  transmission  of  any  gift.  Only  a 
few  of  many  children  would  be  likely  to  dif¬ 
fer  from  mediocrity  so  widely  as  their  mid¬ 
parent  [average  condition  of  the  two  par¬ 
ents]  and  still  fewer  would  differ  as  widely 
as  the  more  exceptional  of  the  two  parents. 
The  more  bountifully  the  parent  is  gifted  by 
Nature,  the  more  rare  will  be  his  good  for¬ 
tune  if  he  begets  a  son  who  is  as  richly  en¬ 
dowed  as  himself,  and  still  more  so  if  he  has 
a  son  who  is  endowed  yet  more  largely.” 

An  excellent  example  of  the  results  of  this 
latter  law  may  be  seen  in  the  case  of  Gal¬ 
ton’s  collateral  family,  that  of  the  Darwins. 
Of  Charles  Darwin’s  five  sons  four  have 
shown  unusual  mental  ability — but  none 
has  been  a  second  Charles.  But  we  are  all 
familiar  with  examples  of  “filial  regression.” 
Indeed,  so  conspicuous  in  our  eyes  is  the  fre¬ 
quent  failure  of  the  children  to  equal  an  un¬ 
usually  able  parent  in  mental  capacity  that 
we  tend  to  overlook  the  equally  frequent 


46 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


possession  by  these  children  of  mental  en¬ 
dowment  above  the  average  of  the  popula¬ 
tion.  But  the  law  of  filial  regression  calls  for 
both  these  phenomena. 

Galton’s  generalizations  based  on  the  ex¬ 
amination  and  st  atistical  treatment  of  many 
data  mark  a  distinct  step  forward  in  the 
study  of  heredity.  Especially  must  we  be 
grateful  to  him  for  having  brought  mental 
inheritance  into  line  with  physical  inheri¬ 
tance  and  for  having  determined  and  ex¬ 
pressed  the  general  or  average  inheritance 
behavior  of  both  physical  and  mental  herit¬ 
able  endowment  by  common  generaliza¬ 
tions.  But  interesting  and  suggestive  as 
these  generalizations  may  be  they  do  not 
tell  us  what  we  especially  wish  to  know,  and 
that  is  something  about  the  specific  inheri¬ 
tance  behavior  of  specific  traits;  something 
about  what  we  may  probably  or  certainly 
expect  with  regard  to  the  presence  or  ab¬ 
sence  in  the  child  or  children  of  a  given  trait, 
physical  or  mental,  which  is  included  in  the 
history  of  this  child’s  ancestry.  If,  for  exam¬ 
ple,  both  of  the  parents  are  feeble-minded, 
or  one  is  feeble-minded  and  the  other  nor¬ 
mal,  or  if  both  parents  are  normal  but  one 
or  two  or  three  or  all  of  the  grandparents 
are  feeble-minded,  or  if  all  are  normal,  will 
the  child  or  children  be  feeble-minded  or 


INHERITANCE  OF  MIND 


47 


not?  That  is  the  kind  of  question  we  burn  to 
have  answered  by  the  students  of  heredity. 
Can  they  answer  such  questions? 

In  the  eighteen-fifties  and  -sixties,  an 
Augustinian  monk,  Gregor  Mendel,  living 
in  a  cloister  in  Briinn,  Austria,  made  a  series 
of  experiments  in  hybridizing  various  races 
of  peas  in  the  cloister  garden.  He  published 
the  results  of  his  experiments,  together  with 
a  theoretical  explanation  of  them,  in  the  ob¬ 
scure  journal  of  the  local  natural  history  so¬ 
ciety  of  Briinn.  Here  they  lay,  practically 
unobserved,  certainly  unappreciated,  until 
1900,  when  three  famous  European  botan¬ 
ists,  one  in  Holland,  one  in  Germany,  and 
one  in  Austria,  all  working  independently 
along  lines  tending  to  lead  them  to  conclu¬ 
sions  similar  to  Mendel’s,  all  independently 
and  practically  simultaneously,  discovered 
Mendel’s  work  and  made  it  known  to  the 
world.  For  thirty  years  an  epoch-making 
discovery  in  science  had  lain  hidden!  Now 
Mendel,  Mendelism,  and  Mendelian  inheri¬ 
tance  are  names  as  familiar  to  biologists  as 
Darwin,  Darwinism,  and  Darwinian  selec¬ 
tion.  And  in  time  they  will  be  as  familiar  to 
laymen. 

Mendel  made  the  beginning  of  the  more 
important  part  of  what  we  may  call  the  “new 
heredity.”  Many  followers  have  developed 


48  MIND  AND  HEREDITY 

this  new  heredity  into  a  fascinating  and  im¬ 
posing  special  science.  It  is  already  in  the 
way  of  answering  precisely  some  of  those 
questions  about  inheritance  that  we  most 
want  answered.  It  deals  with  the  inherit¬ 
ance  behavior  of  specific  traits  of  plants,  an¬ 
imals,  and  man,  and  with  the  hereditary 
make-up  of  specific  individuals.  And  it  re¬ 
veals  much  of  the  actual  physical  mechan¬ 
ism  of  heredity. 

Mendel,  in  his  own  work,  crossed  differ¬ 
ent  races  of  peas — he  worked  also  with  some 
other  plants — which  differed  plainly  and 
characteristically  in  such  specific  and  im¬ 
mediately  contrasted  details  as  height  of 
stem,  character  of  seed  coat,  form  of  the 
pods,  and  so  forth.  He  crossed  a  race  with 
tall  stem  with  one  of  low  stem,  a  race  wdth 
wrinkled  seeds  with  one  of  smoothly  round 
seeds,  and  so  on,  and  noted  the  outcome  in 
every  one  of  the  offspring  produced  by  each 
cross-mating.  He  then  mated  these  hybrids 
among  themselves  and  similarly  recorded 
the  results  for  all  of  the  second-generation 
offspring,  and  he  did  the  same  for  still  suc¬ 
ceeding  generations. 

From  all  this  intensive  work  Mendel  ar¬ 
rived  at  several  definite  and  surprising  and 
important  results — results  not  limited  to 
garden  peas  but  holding  for  other  plants,  for 


INHERITANCE  OF  MIND 


49 


animals  and  for  man.  One  of  these  results  is 
that,  given  a  definite  knowledge  of  the  pres¬ 
ence  or  absence  in  the  germ  cells  of  given 
parents  of  some  physical  or  chemical  deter¬ 
miner  of  a  certain  trait  or  traits — and  this 
can  be  determined  from  a  knowledge  of  two 
or  three  ancestral  generations — definite 
prophecy  can  be  made  as  to  the  outcome  of 
the  children  of  these  parents  with  regard  to 
this  trait,  either  when  the  two  parents  are 
alike,  or  when  they  differ  in  regard  to  the 
bodily  possession  of  this  trait. 

Another  result  is  the  clearing-up  of  the 
old  mystery  concerning  the  passing-on  of  a 
trait  by  parents  not  possessing  it,  that  is,  in 
bodily  or  mental  manifestation.  The  explan¬ 
ation  of  this  depends  upon  the  fact,  also 
first  clearly  indicated  by  Mendel’s  work, 
that  the  possession  of  the  determiner  of  a 
trait  in  the  germ  cells  does  not  necessarily 
assure  the  bodily  development  of  the  trait 
in  the  person  producing,  or  produced  from, 
such  germ  cells.  For  example,  a  normal- 
minded  mother  and  father  of  a  certain  ger¬ 
minal  character  and  history  can  produce 
feeble-minded  children ;  and  a  feeble-minded 
mother  of  a  certain  germinal  character  and 
history  can  produce  normal-minded  chil¬ 
dren.  The  germinal  and  bodily  possessions 
of  an  individual  may  differ;  and  it  is  the  ger- 


50 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


minal  rather  than  the  bodily  character  and 
history  of  a  given  individual  that  is  of  prime 
importance  in  understanding  and  prophesy¬ 
ing  the  hereditary  possibilities  of  that  indi¬ 
vidual  and  his  offspring. 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


We  cannot  indulge  in  any  detailed  pre¬ 
sentation  and  discussion  of  the  re¬ 
sults  of  the  intensive  study  of  heredity 
which  has  been  going  on  since  the  days  of 
Galton’s  work,  and  especially  since  the  dis¬ 
covery,  in  1900,  of  Mendel’s  work.  We  may 
be  proud  that  the  biologists  and  psycholo¬ 
gists  of  America  have  taken  a  particularly 
active  and  brilliant  part  in  this  study,  and 
have  made  conspicuous  contributions  both 
to  the  knowledge  of  the  fundamental  phe¬ 
nomena  of  heredity  and  to  the  use  of  this 
knowledge  in  a  practical  way.  Of  special  in¬ 
terest  to  us,  at  the  moment,  is  that  part  of 
this  work  which  has  established  the  general 
Mendelian  character  of  the  inheritance  of 
feeble-mindedness  and  certain  more  defi¬ 
nitely  pathologic  conditions  of  the  nervous 
system;  as  well  as  that  part  of  it  which  has 
led  to  the  extensive  elaboration  and  grow¬ 
ing  use  of  those  ingeniously  devised  tests  of 
mental  capacity  commonly  called  intelli¬ 
gence  tests. 

Out  of  this  work  we  are  coming  to  see 
ever  more  clearly  the  high  importance  of 
the  heredity  influence  in  connection  with 
the  determination  of  our  mental  make-up. 


[  51  ] 


52 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


The  extensive  studies  by  means  of  the  use 
of  these  tests  on  school  children  and  more 
recently  of  college  students,  and,  during  the 
war,  on  that  broad  sample  of  our  population 
represented  by  the  drafted  soldiers,  have  re¬ 
sulted  in  a  large  and  valuable  contribution 
to  our  knowledge  of  the  inherently  different 
kinds  of  minds  and  mental  levels  of  intelli¬ 
gence  represented  within  our  population. 
And  I  say  this  with  full  recognition  of  the  un¬ 
fortunate  exaggeration  in  the  claims  made 
by  some  persons  for  this  work.  I  should  not 
fail  to  note  in  this  connection  that  these  ex¬ 
aggerated  claims  are  not  made  by  the  com¬ 
petent  and  careful  men  who  have  actually 
done  the  work  of  devising  and  testing  the 
tests;  such  men  as  Yerkes  and  Terman, 
Yoakum  and  Boring,  Thorndike  and  Whip¬ 
ple,  Haggerty  and  Brigham,  and  others 
whom  I  ought  also  to  name. 

It  has  been,  indeed,  the  common  knowl¬ 
edge  of  all  of  us,  for  all  of  our  lives  since 
babyhood,  that  our  playmates  and  school¬ 
mates,  our  college  chums  and  our  friends 
and  acquaintances,  even  our  brothers  and 
sisters  and  parents  and  relatives,  do  have 
different  kinds  of  minds;  and  that  certain  of 
the  differences  in  these  minds  do  persist,  and 
often  reveal  themselves  more  obviously  as 
the  years  pass,  despite  all  the  sameness  of 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


53 


tradition  and  education  which  is  brought  to 
bear  on  them  by  parental  and  social  control. 

If  we  can  detach  ourselves  sufficiently  to 
scrutinize  with  unprejudiced  eyes  our  own 
mental  capacity  and  behavior,  we  can  rec¬ 
ognize  distinct  and  persistent  modes  of  our 
mental  operations  and  distinct  limitations 
in  our  mental  possibilities,  and  these  despite 
all  our  schooling  and  training  and  opportu¬ 
nities.  Fortunately  for  our  complacency, 
Nature  seems  to  compensate,  in  the  case  of 
many  of  us,  for  her  meagerness  of  general 
mental  gifts  by  a  generous  special  gift  of 
self-assurance,  a  pleasant  blindness  to  or 
unawareness  of  our  lackings.  We  often  do 
not  seem  to  know  how  little  our  knowing 
can  be. 

But  if  we  cannot  see  with  sufficient  and 
useful  clearness  our  own  inherent  and  per¬ 
sistent  mental  peculiarities  and  limitations, 
we  can  abundantly  see  these  in  our  com¬ 
panions.  I  often  think  I  see  what  seems  to 
be  a  rigid  stone  wall  or  ceiling  stretching 
over  the  heads  of  my  acquaintances  up  to 
and  against  which  during  their  early  years 
of  growth  and  development,  their  heads  rise, 
only  to  be  stopped  there  for  the  rest  of  life. 
These  dungeon  ceilings  are  of  various  heights 
for  my  various  friends.  Occasionally  one  is 
very  high,  unlimitedly  high,  almost.  I  have 


54 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


in  mind,  at  this  moment,  one  such  instance. 
This  man  and  the  rare  others  like  him  reveal 
extraordinary  possibilities  of  human  men¬ 
tal  achievement.  They  give  us  more  hope  of 
the  human  future.  But  I,  and  perhaps  most 
of  you,  have  lower  dungeon  ceilings.  Fortu¬ 
nately,  as  I  have  already  indicated,  that  we 
may  not  be  too  hopeless  or  unhappy  our 
eyes  are  not  in  the  top  of  our  heads.  We 
don’t  see  the  ceiling;  we  don’t  even  feel  the 
gentle  jar  when  our  heads  strike  it. 

But  this  common  and  certain  but  not 
very  definitely  formulated  knowledge  of  the 
variations,  idiocyncrasies  and  limitations  of 
the  human  mind  as  revealed  by  different  in¬ 
dividuals  and  groups  of  individuals,  has 
long  needed  more  precise  formulation  and 
arrangement  on  some  analytic  and  classifi- 
catory  basis.  These  mental  differences  have 
long  needed  more  serious  attention,  more  in¬ 
tensive  study,  and  more  definitive  revela¬ 
tion.  Especially  is  this  needed  in  a  country 
like  ours  with  its  democratic  form  of  gov¬ 
ernment,  its  democratic  form  of  education, 
its  problems  of  immigration  and  racial  char¬ 
acteristics  and  race  assimilation. 

Well,  it  is  precisely  the  chief  merit  of  the 
recent  work  on  intelligence  tests  and  deter¬ 
mination  of  levels  of  intelligence  that  it  all 
makes  for  this  needed  classification  and  pre- 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


55 


cision  of  formulation  of  varying  mental  ca¬ 
pacity,  of  various  kinds  of  mind.  It  all 
tends,  also,  usefully  to  re-concentrate  our 
attention  on  the  age-old,  but  ever  pressing 
and  still  unsolved,  problem  of  the  relative 
influence  and  importance  of  those  comple¬ 
mentary  chief  factors  in  our  individual  de¬ 
velopment  and  racial  evolution,  nature  and 
nurture,  heredity  and  environment  in  its 
broadest  sense.  Therefore,  it  is  with  no  apol¬ 
ogy  that  I  purpose  to  give,  from  the  point 
of  view  of  the  general  biologist,  a  little  spe¬ 
cial  attention  to  this  comparatively  new, 
but,  to  some  of  you,  perhaps  already  too 
hackneyed,  subject  of  intelligence  testing. 
It  is  not  so  much  to  its  methodological  de¬ 
tails  but  to  its  fundamental  basis  and  claims 
for  consideration  that  I  wish  to  ask  your  at¬ 
tention. 

Because  of  certain  implications  ascribed 
to  intelligence  testing  and  its  revelations, 
which  incite  the  antagonism  of  the  believers 
in  that  curiously  persistent  fiction,  the 
equality  of  man,  and  of  those  who  would 
organize  society  on  the  basis  of  this  ac¬ 
cepted  equality,  who  would,  to  be  more  pre¬ 
cise,  organize  society  communistically,  va¬ 
rious  heated  efforts  to  discredit  intelligence 
testing  have  been  recently  made.  Also,  there 
seems  to  be  a  fear  among  a  considerable 


56 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


number  of  professors  of  education  that  too 
much  attention  given  to  seeking  to  under¬ 
stand  and  measure  differences  in  inherent 
intelligence  or  mental  capacity  will  tend  to 
magnify  in  people’s  minds  the  importance 
of  heredity  and  discredit  the  importance  of 
the  environmental  factor,  education,  in  the 
determination  of  our  mental  make-up.  It  is 
important,  therefore,  that  serious  consider¬ 
ation  be  given  by  unprejudiced,  but  inter¬ 
ested  people,  to  this  new  scientific  contribu¬ 
tion  to  human  understanding  which  seems, 
by  every  present  indication,  to  have  come 
to  stay  and  to  exert  its  benign  or  malign  in¬ 
fluence  on  our  attitude  and  efforts  toward 
the  education  and  social  organization  of  our 
people. 

In  the  very  first  place  we  want  to  know 
just  what  it  is  that  intelligence  tests  test 
and  measure.  We  all  know  that  any  person’s 
mental  make-up  consists  partly  of  some¬ 
thing  he  has  inherited  from,  or,  better, 
through,  his  parents,  and  partly  of  some 
things  that  he  has  acquired  from  his  parents 
and  others  acting  as  teachers  and  precep¬ 
tors  and  examples  to  imitate — or  to  avoid 
imitating — as  well  as  from  books  and  ob¬ 
servation  and  experience  and  from  the  per¬ 
sonal  exercise  or  lack  of  exercise  of  his  in¬ 
herited  mental  faculties.  Among  those  things 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


57 


he  has  inherited  are  general  mental  capac¬ 
ity  and  certain  specific  mental  traits,  which 
we  can  group  together  under  the  name  of 
intelligence.  And  there  are  also  emotions  and 
temperament,  natural  courage  or  coward¬ 
ice,  aggressiveness  or  retiringness,  born  in¬ 
dependence  or  born  dependency,  born  lead¬ 
ership  or  born  following.  Now  of  all  these 
things  inherited  or  acquired  what  are  those 
which  intelligence  tests  really  claim  to  and 
do  test?  Just  and  only  those,  but  those  high¬ 
ly  important  ones,  indicated  by  the  name 
intelligence;  those  inherited  qualities  of  gen¬ 
eral  mental  capacity  and  specific  mental 
traits  which  compose  what  we  call  intelli¬ 
gence;  meaning  native  capacity  for  learning 
by  observation,  experience  and  being  taught, 
mental  alertness  and  suppleness,  keenness, 
accuracy,  quickness  and  control.  But  not 
various  other  inherited  mental  or  nervous 
characteristics  such  as  temperament,  emo¬ 
tions,  courage,  aggressiveness,  leadership 
and  so  on.  And  especially  not  those  mental 
possessions  of  acquired  or  learned  informa¬ 
tion  and  knowledge,  manners  and  methods. 

Too  many  people  jump  at  the  wrong  con¬ 
clusion  from  the  too  little  they  read  or  hear, 
or  the  too  hasty  reading  and  careless  hear¬ 
ing  of  what  they  read  and  hear,  that  the  in¬ 
telligence  testers  claim  to  test  and  evaluate 


58 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


all  of  an  individuars  mental  baggage.  This 
is,  of  course,  not  true;  but  the  denial  needs 
to  be  often  and  loudly  repeated,  for  on  this 
wrong  assumption  much  careless  and  unjust 
criticism  of  intelligence  testing  and  the  test¬ 
ers  has  been  based.  But  there  are  less  care¬ 
less  critics  who  understand  better  what  the 
intelligence  testers  are  trying  to  do,  and  who 
ask:  Can  they  do  it?  Can  they  really  devise 
tests  the  responses  to  which  are  based  only 
on  inherited  intelligence  as  distinct  from 
acquired  knowledge?  And  if  so,  do  these 
tests  really  enable  grades  or  degrees  of  in¬ 
telligence  to  be  determined  and  measured 
with  sufficient  precision  to  warrant  sum¬ 
mary  expression  in  terms  of  mental  as  com¬ 
pared  with  chronologic  ages  or  in  terms  of 
numerous  gradatory  categories  indicated  by 
serial  letters  or  figures?  These  are  the  ques¬ 
tions,  with  their  implied  doubts,  that  the 
test-devising  and  test-applying  psycholo¬ 
gists  must  answer  convincingly  before  we 
can  accept  their  intelligence  tests  and  test¬ 
ing  as  a  basis  for  radical  modification  of  our 
educational  and  societal  administration. 

The  answer  to  the  first  of  these  questions, 
that  which  asks  if  the  tests  can  be  limited  to 
inherent  intelligence  to  the  exclusion  of  ac¬ 
quired  knowledge  is  not  yet  perhaps  entire¬ 
ly  definite.  Some  of  the  tests  repeated  on 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


59 


the  same  children  at  times  separated  from 
each  other  by  a  few  years  receive  better  re¬ 
sponses  in  the  later  times.  But,  of  course, 
even  the  inherent  capacity  of  a  child  cannot 
be  all  exhibited  in  babyhood.  There  is  an 
unfolding  of  inherent  mental  capacity,  just 
as  there  is  of  physical  qualities,  during 
childhood.  No  child  is  born  full-fledged. 
Some  children  unfold  or  develop  more  rap¬ 
idly  than  others.  But  this  unfolding  reaches 
its  term,  on  the  whole,  comparatively  early 
in  life;  perhaps  in  most  cases  by  the  age  of 
sixteen.  Not  so,  of  course,  the  individual’s 
acquirement  of  information,  special  knowl¬ 
edge  and  skill.  This  may  go  on  even  after 
the  age  when  native  intelligence  begins  to 
decline,  a  phenomenon  that  certainly  oc¬ 
curs  in  most  individuals  although  no  tests 
have  yet  been  devised  to  determine  when 
this  retrogression  begins  or  how  far  it  goes. 
We  sometimes  see  very  vividly  among  our 
friends  and  acquaintances  the  reality  and 
the  distressing  extent  of  it.  But  there  are 
many  individuals  whose  continued  acquir¬ 
ing  of  knowledge  compensates  in  consider¬ 
able  degree  for  the  loss,  in  their  later  years, 
of  the  earlier  vigor  and  keenness  of  their 
native  intelligence. 

But  enough  has  been  done  by  way  of  re¬ 
peated  testing  of  children  and  soldiers  under 


60 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


differing  conditions  of  time,  physical  and 
mental  freshness  or  tiredness,  and  so  on,  to 
indicate  that,  on  the  whole,  the  intelligence 
tests  of  today,  which  have  been  developed, 
both  for  individual  and  group  testing,  with 
great  ingenuity,  to  eliminate  any  advan¬ 
tage  of  literacy  as  compared  with  illiteracy, 
good  education  as  compared  with  poor,  and 
wide  experience  as  compared  with  narrow, 
do  call  for  responses  which  can  be  little 
influenced  by  acquired  knowledge.  They  do 
give,  on  the  whole,  a  fair  picture  of  one’s 
inherent  intellectual  possibilities. 

Because  of  the  rather  startling  discovery 
that  nearly  25  per  cent  of  the  million  and  a 
half  drafted  men  of  the  American  army  who 
were  intelligence-tested  during  the  World 
War  were  “found  to  be  unable  to  read  and 
understand  newspapers  and  write  letters 
home”  it  was  necessary  to  devise  special 
tests,  the  now  famous  Beta  tests,  in  which 
no  linguistic  elements  entered  and  which, 
presumably,  made  no  demand  whatever  on 
educational  acquirements.  The  Alpha  tests 
were  applied  to  the  literate  men;  but  many 
of  them  were  also  tested  by  the  Beta  tests. 
More  than  83,000  enlisted  men  were  given 
individual  examinations  in  addition  to  Al¬ 
pha,  Beta,  or  both.  The  correspondence  in 
scores  of  the  same  men  on  both  the  Alpha 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS  61 

and  Beta  group  tests  and  on  individuals 
tests  was  remarkably  close. 

With  regard  to  the  other  question,  there 
is  certainly  now  available  a  sufficient  body 
of  evidence  to  warrant  an  expression  in 
rather  definite,  but  always  relative ,  terms  of 
different  grades  of  intelligence  as  deter¬ 
mined  by  the  tests.  These  are  not  expres¬ 
sions  of  different  grades  of  total  native 
value,  mentally,  of  an  individual  even  apart 
from  his  acquirements,  because,  to  repeat 
again  the  important  but  too  often  uncon¬ 
sidered  fact,  the  tests  do  not  test  and  do 
not  pretend  to  test  those  various  native 
mental  and  nervous  possessions  which  we 
speak  of  as  temperament,  emotions,  hon¬ 
esty  and  dishonesty,  courage  and  coward¬ 
ice,  independence  and  dependence,  and  so 
on,  and  which  play  a  very  important  role  in 
determining  our  behavior  and  achievement. 
Nor  are  these  expressions  couched  in  abso¬ 
lute  terms  or  even  in  relative  terms  indicat¬ 
ing  approximation  to  or  distance  from  an 
ideal  standard. 

Dr.  Yerkes,  in  a  recent  paper  in  the  Atlan¬ 
tic  Monthly ,  quotes  from  a  writer  in  a  maga¬ 
zine  of  different  type  and  greater  circulation 
as  follows:  “The  army  mental  tests  have 
shown  that  there  are,  roughly,  forty-five 
million  people  in  this  country  who  have  no 


62 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


sense.  .  .  .  Besides  the  forty-five  millions 
who  have  no  sense,  but  a  majority  of  votes, 
there  are  twenty-five  millions  who  have  a 
little  sense.  .  .  .  Next  there  are  twenty- 
five  millions  with  fair-to-middling  sense. 
They  haven’t  much,  but  what  there  is,  is 
good.  Then  lastly,  there  are  a  few  over  four 
millions  who  have  a  great  deal  of  sense. 
They  have  the  things  we  call  ‘brains’.” 

Dr.  Yerkes,  who  was  largely  responsible 
for  the  army  tests,  gets  pardonably  vehe¬ 
ment  in  referring  to  such  statements.  “Are 
they  true?”  he  asks.  “No,”  he  answers.  “Is 
there  any  truth  in  them?  Just  enough  to 
make  them  worse  than  false.  They  discredit 
psychology  and  mislead  the  reader  in  im¬ 
portant  matters  of  fact.” 

As  a  matter  of  fact  the  different  groups 
into  which  the  army  testers  placed  their  sub¬ 
jects  after  testing  them,  designated  by  let¬ 
ters  as  A,  B,  C+,  C,  C — ,  D,  D —  and  E 
men,  who  can  be  conveniently  defined,  rela¬ 
tive  to  each  other,  as  men  of  very  superior, 
superior,  high  average,  average,  low  aver¬ 
age,  inferior,  very  inferior  and  most  inferior 
intelligence,  indicate  primarily  a  compari¬ 
son  of  one  individual  with  another  with  re¬ 
gard  to  the  respective  possession  by  these 
various  individuals  of  native  intelligence.  It 
was,  on  the  whole,  unfortunate  that  this 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


63 


comparison  was  extended,  for  the  laudable 
purpose  of  making  it  more  vivid,  to  test 
scores  made  by  children  of  different  ages  in 
various  groups.  Out  of  this  has  grown  the 
widely  heralded  statement  that  the  army 
draft  and,  hence,  taking  it  as  a  fair  sample, 
our  male  population,  has  only  the  intelli¬ 
gence  on  the  average  of  a  thirteen-year-old 
child,  which  does  not  mean  to  the  informed 
psychologist  what  it  is  likely  to  mean  to  you 
and  me.  In  fact  there  has  been  no  determi¬ 
nation  made  of  the  average  intelligence  of 
all  13-year  old  children. 

The  child  intelligence  testers  have  adopt¬ 
ed  the  custom  of  expressing  the  actual  rate 
of  mental  development  of  a  subject  by  a 
mathematical  coefficient  called  the  Intelli¬ 
gence  Quotient,  which  is  the  percentage 
ratio  between  the  chronological  and  the 
mental  age  of  the  subject.  This  mental  age 
is  a  statement  of  the  degree  of  mental  retar¬ 
dation  or  advancement  of  a  child  of  a  given 
age  in  a  given  group  compared  with  the 
mental  condition  of  average  normal  children 
of  the  same  age  in  the  same  group.  Thus  a 
child  of  twelve  years  old  may  be  found  by 
the  tests  to  have  a  mental  age  of  but  eight 
years,  meaning  that  it  has  a  mental  condi¬ 
tion  not  beyond  that  of  the  average  normal 
condition  of  children  of  eight  in  the  group 


64 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


tested.  Repeated  tests  of  the  same  children 
at  intervals  of  one  to  four  years  have  indi¬ 
cated  that  the  intelligence  quotient  of  a  giv¬ 
en  child  remains  practically  constant  be¬ 
tween  the  ages  of  ten  and  sixteen  years. 

By  reason  of  its  relative  stability,  there¬ 
fore,  the  intelligence  quotient  becomes  a 
fairly  reliable  and  useful  test  of  intelligence. 
Once  determined,  it  seems  possible  to  pre¬ 
dict  by  it,  within  reasonable  limits,  the 
probable  relative  level  to  which  a  given  in¬ 
dividual’s  intelligence  will  develop.  From  a 
rather  wide  experience  of  these  specific  rat¬ 
ings  of  mental  age  and  intelligence  quotient 
in  various  groups,  certain  general  categories 
of  mental  capacity  or  incapacity  have  been 
established  and  are  now  commonly  used  by 
psychologists.  At  bottom  is  the  category 
feeble-minded,  then,  in  ascending  order, 
border-line,  dull-normal,  average-normal, 
and  superior. 

These  categories,  like  the  A,  B,  C,  D,  E 
categories  of  the  army  testers  are,  as  I  have 
said,  categories  of  relative  or  compared  val¬ 
ues  and  should  not  be  taken  usually  for 
more  than  that.  But  we  do  know  that  some 
of  these  categories  can  be  interpreted,  in 
some  measure,  into  absolute  terms.  For  ex¬ 
ample,  most  feeble-minded  persons  are  lit¬ 
erally  unable  to  maintain  themselves  un- 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


05 


aided,  let  alone  contribute  to  maintain 
others,  in  human  society.  They  become  a 
burden  on  the  social  organization.  The  two 
men  out  of  every  hundred  of  the  army  draft 
tested,  whose  scorings  in  the  mental  tests 
revealed  them  so  mentally  inferior  that  they 
could  not  safely  be  recommended  for  regu¬ 
lar  military  training  and  duty  were,  until 
their  discharge  or  consignment  to  merely 
manual  labor  groups,  a  load  on  the  military 
organization  of  the  American  army.  As  Dr. 
Yerkes  points  out,  had  the  Army  rejected 
or  discharged  immediately  on  the  basis  of 
psychological  examination  the  lowest  100,- 
000  of  its  recruits  it  would  have  lessened  by 
at  least  one-half  military  crime,  difficulty 
and  delay  in  training  due  to  stupidity  and 
inequalities  in  strength  of  organization. 

So  there  is  after  all  some  indication  given 
by  intelligence  tests  of  absolute  human  val¬ 
ues.  It  is  quite  true  that  intelligence  is  but 
one  factor  in  the  absolute  value  of  a  man.  A 
man  might  have  an  intelligence  sufficient  to 
make  him  available  for  use  as  an  army  offi¬ 
cer,  but  if  he  lacked  courage  and  some  qual¬ 
ities  of  leadership  this  would  be  a  poor  use 
to  make  of  him.  But  also  if  a  man  had  cour¬ 
age  and  leadership  and  was  of  very  inferior 
intelligence  he  would  not  be  a  very  useful 
officer.  There  can  certainly  be  no  question 


66 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


on  the  part  of  those  of  us  who  admit  that 
there  are,  among  human  beings,  differences 
in  native  intelligence,  that  a  more  precise 
knowledge  of  such  differences  can  be  made 
useful  in  our  attempts  to  solve  the  serious 
problems  presented  to  us  in  connection  with 
education,  military  and  industrial  efficiency, 
immigration  and  racial  assimilation  and  so¬ 
cial  organization  generally.  Such  recent 
books  as  Goddard’s  “Human  Efficiency  and 
Levels  of  Intelligence”  and  the  admirable 
analysis,  under  the  title  “A  Study  of  Ameri¬ 
can  Intelligence,”  of  the  results  of  the  army 
tests  by  Professor  Brigham  of  Princeton 
university,  show  us  something  of  where  we 
now  stand  in  regard  to  this  knowledge  and 
some  of  the  uses  we  can  make  of  it;  and  they 
show  what  further  knowledge  we  can  read¬ 
ily  acquire  if  we  set  ourselves  to  it.  The 
present-day  situation  of  our  schools  and  uni¬ 
versities  ;  our  pressing  present-day  immigra¬ 
tion  problem,  and  the  present-day  wide¬ 
spread  social  unrest,  demand  of  all  of  us  who 
are  interested  in  the  fate  of  the  nation  that 
we  overlook  no  least  chance  to  inform  our¬ 
selves  of  anything  which  science  has  to  offer 
us  that  may  be  useful  to  know  in  connection 
with  our  efforts  to  solve  these  problems. 
The  modern  studies  of  intelligence  do  offer 
us  something  that  may  be  useful  in  this  way. 


INTELLIGENCE  TESTS 


67 


I  have  tried  now  to  show  that  scientific 
knowledge  reveals  with  no  uncertainty  the 
great  role  that  heredity  plays  in  determin¬ 
ing  kinds  of  mind  in  Nature  and,  of  particu¬ 
lar  interest  to  us,  in  determining  our  own 
mental  make-up.  We  have  seen  how  large  a 
part  inherent  or  native  intelligence  takes  in 
this.  We  simply  must  not  overlook  this  fact. 
One  of  the  major  reasons  for  our  present 
loud  outcries  about  the  unsatisfactoriness 
and  waste  in  college  and  university  instruc¬ 
tion  is  because  we  do  overlook  it.  At  least 
by  our  present  methods,  by  our  clinging  to 
tradition,  and  by  our  necessity  of  mass¬ 
handling  the  crowding  groups  of  college  stu¬ 
dents — they  have  increased  by  100%  in  the 
last  five  years — we  do,  in  effect,  deliberately 
overlook  this  fact  of  wide  native  difference 
in  minds.  And  this  despite  the  sound  and  re¬ 
vealing  start  that  our  psychologists  have 
made  not  only  in  informing  us  of  this  fact — 
which,  of  course,  we  knew  before — but  of 
offering  us  methods  of  classifying  in  some 
measure  these  varying  inherent  mental  ca¬ 
pacities,  which  is  the  first  step  toward  treat¬ 
ing  them  variously  as  their  variety  demands. 
In  the  face  of  this  we  go  on  in  the  universi¬ 
ties  treating  all  student  minds  as  if  they  had 
been  standardized  by  nature  or  previous 
schooling,  and  hence  as  if,  for  their  further 


68 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


best  development,  standardized  mass  meth¬ 
ods  were  quite  sufficient.  No  wonder  the  ca¬ 
pable-minded  students  must  idle,  or  find 
other  activities  open  to  them  out  of  class¬ 
room  and  laboratories  for  the  exercise  of 
their  minds.  It  is  not  their  fault  if  they  do 
it;  it  is  our  fault.  And  similarly  we  go  on  at¬ 
tacking  those  other  various  problems  of  our 
economic  and  political  and  social  life,  and 
futilely  fussing  with  them,  with  all  too  much 
fatal  disregard  of  that  fundamental  element 
in  them  all  of  the  proved  reality  of  varying 
degrees  of  native  intelligence. 


EDUCATION  AND 
THE  MIND 


Eminent  educators  are  eminently  dis¬ 
turbed  now-a-days.  One  hears  or  reads, 
coming  from  them,  rather  panicky  declara¬ 
tions  about  the  bankruptcy  of  American 
education,  the  appalling  spectre  of  an  illit¬ 
erate  American  nation,  the  general  ineffi¬ 
ciency  of  American  university  methods,  the 
swamping  of  American  colleges  by  incom¬ 
ing  waves  of  moron  students,  the  submer¬ 
gence  of  the  humanities  by  the  hideous  Jug¬ 
gernaut  of  science,  the  utter  vanishing  of 
what  little  sweetness  and  light  we  have  ever 
had. 

Fortunately  for  my  own  peace  of  mind  I 
had  an  opportunity  recently  to  visit  Russia 
and  talk  with  Lunacharsky  the  Soviet  Min¬ 
ister  of  Education,  and  I  know  from  person¬ 
al  observation  and  much  added  reliable  in¬ 
formation  something  of  the  present  state  of 
affairs  in  such  centers  of  educational  leader¬ 
ship  as  Vienna  and  Berlin,  and  hence  know 
that  however  bad  is  our  situation  theirs  is 
worse.  So  I  take  that  selfish  and  short¬ 
sighted  comfort  in  regard  to  our  own  troub¬ 
les  that  comes  from  seeing  other  peoples’ 
troubles.  I  take  refuge  in  the  natural  philos- 

[  69  ] 


70 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


ophy  of  relativity.  Relatively,  we  are  not  so 
badly  off. 

But  after  all  we  must  not  close  our  eyes 
to  things  that  are  happening  in  the  realm  of 
absolute  values.  We  may  be  less  illiterate 
than  the  Russians,  but  we  are,  a  certain 
proportion  of  us,  indeed  illiterate.  Luna¬ 
charsky  has  recently  announced — I  may  in¬ 
terject  that  I  do  not  believe  everything  that 
comes  out  of  Moscow — that  in  a  year  and  a 
half  every  Russian  soldier  will  be  able  to 
read  and  write  his  native  language.  A  large 
fraction,  perhaps  as  high  as  one-fourth,  of 
our  own  drafted  army,  which  may  be  taken 
as  a  nearly  fair  sample  of  our  male  popula¬ 
tion  in  the  time  of  the  World  War,  were  “un¬ 
able  to  read  and  understand  newspapers  and 
write  letters  home,”  to  use  the  interesting 
phraseology  of  the  army  examiners.  Poland 
ranks  its  university  professors,  as  to  official 
status  and  salary,  on  a  level  with  major- 
generals  in  its  army.  I  will  not  undertake  to 
estimate  the  social  and  salary  status  of  our 
professors.  Czecho-Slovakia  is  providing  a 
library  for  every  one  of  its  towns  of  a  popu¬ 
lation  of  four  hundred  and  over.  Even  the 
Carnegie  libraries  are  a  little  less  abundant 
than  that.  A  Swedish  professor  of  education, 
contrasting  Swedish  and  American  schools, 
remarked  that  in  his  own  countrv  the  word 


EDUCATION  AND  THE  MIND  71 

“teacher”  is  not  a  noun  feminine  as  it  is  in 
America.  A  recent  Bulletin  of  the  U.  S.  Bu¬ 
reau  of  Education  shows,  indeed,  that  the 
total  percentage  of  men  teachers  in  Ameri¬ 
can  city  schools  is  11  while  the  percentage 
of  such  teachers  in  the  city  elementary 
schools  is  4. 

One  of  the  high  schools  of  Washington 
works  its  pupils  in  shifts  but  its  teachers  all 
the  time.  American  teachers’  and  college 
professors’  salaries  have  gone  up — but  the 
cost  of  their  food  and  clothing  has  gone  up 
faster.  The  number  of  college  students  has 
doubled  in  the  last  five  years,  but  the  num¬ 
ber  of  college  instructors  has  been  far  from 
doubling.  Presidents  of  universities  are, 
some  of  them,  on  the  verge,  or  over  it,  of 
hysterics.  The  intelligence  testers  are  in¬ 
forming  us  daily  by  specific  figures  what  we 
knew  before  as  general  facts — but  these 
facts  seem  more  exact  and  awful  as  they 
take  on  the  manner  of  mathematical  equa¬ 
tions. 

So  much  for  a  cursory  glance  at  the  edu¬ 
cational  status  of  the  land.  What  should  we 
do,  what  can  we  do,  what  are  we  doing, 
about  it? 

The  intelligence  testers,  and  the  child 
psychology  students  generally,  have  made 
an  impress  on  the  primary  and  secondary 


72 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


schools  and  on  the  institutions  for  juvenile 
delinquents.  They  have  shown  that  they 
can  go  far  in  determining  and  classifying 
relatively  the  native  intelligence  of  children, 
and  that  this  native  intelligence,  this  inheri¬ 
ted  kind  of  mind,  of  the  child,  determines 
in  no  inconsiderable  measure  the  possibili¬ 
ties  of  that  child  which  can  be  realized ,  but 
not  materially  increased,  by  home  and 
school  environment.  Some  backward  chil¬ 
dren  come  from  good  homes  and  some  for¬ 
ward  children  from  bad  ones  even  though, 
in  the  majority  of  cases,  normal  and  for¬ 
ward  children  come  from  good  homes  and 
sub-normal  children  from  bad  homes.  But 
this  more  usual  condition  is  perhaps  less  be¬ 
cause  of  the  influence  of  the  home  environ¬ 
ment  itself  on  the  child  than  because  the 
bad  homes  are  usually  homes  created  by 
parents  of  low  mentality  and  the  good 
homes  are  created  by  parents  of  normal  or 
superior  mentality,  the  children  deriving 
their  sub-normal  or  normal  mentality  by 
inheritance  from  these  parents. 

But  this  is  not  to  decry  for  a  moment  the 
high  and  absolute  value  of  a  careful  atten¬ 
tion  to  the  environmental  influences  ex¬ 
erted  on  the  developing  child  both  in  home 
and  school.  For  each  kind  or  grade  of  mind 
has  its  own  possibilities,  and  to  attain  the 


EDUCATION  AND  THE  MIND  73 


maximum  of  these  possibilities  the  maxi¬ 
mum  of  opportunity  and  help  is  necessary. 
That  wonderful  thin,  sensitive,  cellular  cor¬ 
tex  that  spreads  over  the  fore-brain  of  the 
child,  blank,  and  inviting  the  parent  and 
teacher  painters  to  paint  on  it  the  most 
beautiful  picture  of  life  possible  to  be  paint¬ 
ed  with  all  the  experience  of  ages  in  it,  all 
our  knowledge  of  Nature  in  it,  and  all  the 
stories  of  human  goodness  and  sweetness  in 
it,  is  the  great  gift  of  Nature  to  the  environ¬ 
mentalist.  So  much  good  for  the  child,  or  so 
much  bad  for  it,  can  be  done  with  this  op¬ 
portunity  that  even  the  most  convinced 
hereditarian  must  be  very,  very  careful  nev 
er  to  rob  anv  mother  or  father  or  teacher  or 

t/ 

preacher  of  his  or  her  faith  in  the  actuality 
and  possibility  of  environmental  influence. 
But,  equally  important,  no  environmental¬ 
ist  should  try  to  delude  any  parent  with  the 
idea  that  anything  can  be  made  out  of  any 
child  by  environment  and  education.  I  can 
not  forget  the  circular  I  once  received,  which 
asked  me  the  burning  question  if  I  wanted 
to  be  another  Michaelangelo  or  Leonardo 
da  Vinci,  and  suggesting  that  if  I  wanted  to 
I  should  take  fifty  dollars’  worth  of  advice 
or  instruction  from  the  author  of  the  circu¬ 
lar.  The  promised  result  would,  I  admit,  be 
cheap  at  the  price — if  that  result  could  be 


74 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


brought  about.  But  I  happen  to  know  that 
it  couldn’t. 

There  is  no  doubt  that  the  intelligence 
testers  have  shown  by  their  tests  that  in¬ 
heritance  does  determine  various  levels  of 
intelligence  which  in  turn  determine  in  some 
measure  the  learning  and  information-ac¬ 
quiring  possibilities  of  school  children. 
These  varying  mental  conditions  indicate 
the  need  of  an  educational  treatment  adapt¬ 
ed  to  the  special  needs  and  possibilities  of 
special  categories  of  pupils.  Indeed,  they  are 
strong  arguments  in  favor  of  as  nearly  an 
individual  educational  treatment  as  can 
possibly  be  given  under  the  circumstances 
of  popular  education,  circumstances  that  of 
course  preclude  going  far  in  such  treatment 
in  any  but  a  few  private  schools. 

But  there  can  be,  and  should  be,  a  fur¬ 
ther  and  more  detailed  grouping  of  pupils 
than  our  present  too  wholesale  method  of 
classification  provides.  Such  more  detailed 
classification  and  special  educational  treat¬ 
ment  of  pupils  is  not  a  retrogression  in  de¬ 
mocracy  of  education.  On  the  contrary  it  is 
an  advance  in  it.  For  the  old  or  widely  pres¬ 
ent  method  of  treating  every  child  like  every 
other  is  based  on  the  unwarranted  assump¬ 
tion  of  human  equality,  and  actually  nega¬ 
tives  the  real  aim  of  democratic  education 


EDUCATION  AND  THE  MIND  75 


which  is  to  give  every  child  an  opportunity 
to  make  the  most  of  its  inherent  possibili¬ 
ties.  It  is  equality  of  opportunity  to  become 
the  most  you  can  that  a  successful  democ¬ 
racy  must  be  based  on. 

All  this  applies  to  college  and  university 
education  as  well  as  to  primary  and  second¬ 
ary  education.  The  intelligence  testers  have 
invaded  the  examination  rooms  of  the  can¬ 
didates  for  college  entrance.  They  have  re¬ 
ceived  here  and  there  a  reluctant  permission 
to  use  a  few  minutes  of  the  valuable  time 
now  devoted,  according  to  the  accepted  rit¬ 
ual,  to  finding  out  how  many  dates  or  names 
of  kings  or  rules  of  grammar  and  diction,  or 
description  of  natural  objects,  the  candi¬ 
dates  have  committed  to  memory.  The  in¬ 
telligence  testers  have  been  permitted  here 
and  there  to  try  their  tests  for  mental  ca¬ 
pacity,  that  is,  capacity  to  learn  and  do 
things  mentally,  on  the  huddled  groups  of 
would-be  Freshmen.  On  the  basis  of  these 
tests  they  have  made  predictions  as  to  how 
long  certain  students  would  last  in  the  col¬ 
lege  they  enter,  that  is,  whether  they  would 
be  dropped  at  the  end  of  the  first  semester, 
or  the  second  or  third,  or  would  stick  on  to 
sheepskin  day  by  virtue  of  professorial  char¬ 
ity,  or  would  go  on  triumphantly  through 
the  four  years  clamoring  for  more  and  hard- 


76 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


er  work  and  impatiently  marking  time  as 
the  instructors  held  them  back  while  they 
slowly  nursed  the  mentally  average  and  in¬ 
ferior  along  to  semester’s  end  after  semes¬ 
ter’s  end.  And  the  testers  have  seen  their 
predictions  come  true. 

If  the  intelligence  testers  can  do  this, 
what  a  waste  of  time  and  energy  and  money 
our  colleges  are  tolerating  in  their  efforts  to 
find  out  during  a  semester  or  year  or  more 
what  students  cannot  keep  up  with  even 
the  moderate — to  be  restrained  in  expres¬ 
sion — mental  achievement  necessary  to 
making  grades  in  the  college  courses.  The 
fact,  and  it  is  a  fact,  that  the  American  uni- 
veristy — curious  hybrid  of  gymnasium  or 
lycee  and  real  university — is  now  giving 
more  attention  and  effort  to  the  less  capa¬ 
ble,  the  uninterested  and  the  non-attaining 
students  than  to  the  more  capable,  the  inter¬ 
ested  and  the  attaining  students,  is  a  men¬ 
ace  to  the  highest  usefulness  of  the  institu¬ 
tion  if  it  is  to  exercise  effectively  its  much- 
needed  true  university  function,  which  is 
the  development  of  thinkers  and  leaders  for 
the  country.  We  may  be  all  equal  in  our 
right  to  receive  service  from  the  state,  but 
we  are  not  all  equal  in  our  capacity  to  give 
service  back  to  it.  The  state,  which  is  sim¬ 
ply  all  of  us,  needs  the  benefit  of  the  best 


EDUCATION  AND  THE  MIND  77 

use  of  the  best  brains,  and  to  get  it  we  must 
see  that  these  best  brains  have  the  best  of 
training,  and  the  opportunity  to  go  as  rap¬ 
idly  and  as  far  as  they  can.  The  problem  of 
what  to  do  with  the  gifted  university  stu¬ 
dent  should  be  looked  on  as  a  problem 
equally  as  important  as  that  problem  to 
which  we  now  give  most  of  our  attention, 
namely,  of  what  to  do  with  the  inherently 
mentally  incapable  student. 


' 


SOCIETAL  ORGANIZATION  AND 
MENTAL  CAPACITY 


e  can  do  best  what  we  are  best  fitted 


V  V  to  do.  This  sounds  like  an  axiom,  a 
“proposition  that  it  is  necessary  to  take  for 
granted,”  as  Webster  says.  We  may  accept 
it  as  such,  but  do  we  govern  our  behavior 
and  our  education  according  to  it?  The  an¬ 
swer  is,  as  they  say  in  the  House  of  Com¬ 
mons,  in  the  negative.  At  least,  it  is  too 
largely  and  generally  in  the  negative. 

“Vocational  guidance”  is  a  name  that, 
like  “eugenics,”  has  come  into  some  disre¬ 
pute  by  being  overworked  by  cranks.  But 
each  is  the  name  for  a  good  idea  and  for 
something  that  all  those  interested  in  the 
advancement  of  individual  and  social  ca¬ 
pacity  and  happiness  should  not  turn  away 
from  simply  because  the  name  has  some  un¬ 
fortunate  connotations. 

Vocational  guidance  does  not  mean  mere¬ 
ly,  or  mostly,  finding  jobs  for  jobless  veter¬ 
ans  or  young  persons  with  high  school  or 
college  diplomas.  Nor  should  or  does  it 
mean  modifying  our  school  system  so  that 
the  curriculum  is  to  be  mostly  given  over  to 
courses  in  currying  horses,  baking  bread  or 
double  entry  bookkeeping.  It  means  a  little 


[  79  ] 


80 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


of  these  and  a  good  deal  of  several  other 
things. 

Vocational  guidance  means,  or  must 
mean,  if  it  is  to  win  much  and  permanent 
favor,  trying  to  find  out  just  how  men  natu¬ 
rally  differ  from  each  other  in  intelligence 
and  temperament,  strong  inclinations  and 
special  capacities,  and  what  these  differ¬ 
ences  indicate  as  to  kind  of  work  and  social 
activities  naturally  differing  kinds  of  men 
can  best  fit  themselves  to  do,  and  what  the 
methods  and  manner  of  this  fitting  can  best 
be.  Vocational  guidance  is  a  natural  and 
needed  consequence  of  recognizing  different 
grades  of  mind  and  of  rallying  to  the  win¬ 
ning  slogan,  equality  of  human  opportunity. 
Equality  of  opportunity  for  all  men  means 
opportunity  to  reach  the  most  and  happiest 
and  hence  the  best  possible  to  each;  and  the 
achievement  of  this  is  obviously  the  way  in 
which  human  society  and  civilization  will 
profit  most  from  human  effort,  which  of 
course  is  the  way  to  an  ever  higher  civiliza¬ 
tion.  To  repeat  our  axiom,  with  some  exten¬ 
sion,  we  can  do  best  what  we  are  best  fitted 
to  do  and  be  happiest  in  doing  it,  and  what 
is  possible  and  best  for  the  most  of  us  indi¬ 
vidually  is  best  and  most  promising  for  us 
as  a  social  group. 

The  world  has  had  for  some  time  now  an 


SOCIETAL  ORGANIZATION  81 

impressive  illustration  before  it,  of  the  re¬ 
results  of  a  vigorous  and  wholesale  attempt 
to  put  into  effect  the  logical  interpretation 
as  to  practise  of  the  slogan,  “equality  of 
men.”  At  the  same  time  that  an  important 
member  of  the  present  American  govern¬ 
ment  issues  a  vigorously  worded  little  book 
on  “American  Individualism”  whose  text  is 
the  slogan,  “equality  of  opportunity  for 
men,”  we  still  hear,  although  ever  more 
faintly,  the  shouting  of  the  old  slogan, 
“equality  of  all  men,”  from  the  present 
Russian  government.  We  have  seen  clearly 
in  Russia  the  results  of  a  deliberate  and 
forced  policy  of  non-vocational  guidance, 
of  an  attempt  to  act  on  the  assumption 
of  the  reality  of  the  equality  of  all  men,  of  a 
disregard  of  the  natural  phenomenon  of 
kinds  of  mind.  Every  man  in  Russia  was  as¬ 
sumed  to  be  the  potential  equal  of  any  other 
man;  any  man  can  do  or  be,  with  similar 
opportunity,  what  any  other  man  can  do 
or  be. 

I  have  already  referred  to  my  opportuni¬ 
ty  of  a  little  more  than  a  year  ago  to  see  per¬ 
sonally  some  of  the  results  of  this  attempt 
in  Russia  to  act  on  these  assumptions,  and 
to  talk  with  some  of  the  men  responsible  for 
the  attempt.  I  had  an  especially  interesting 
talk  with  Kalinin,  the  peasant  president  of 


82 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


the  Soviet  Republic,  about  the  theories  and 
practise  of  the  Government,  and  the  results 
of  its  undertaking  to  develop  concretely  a 
rigidly  communistic  social  organization. 

Kalinin  is  a  man  of  much  native  intelli¬ 
gence,  of  apparent  honesty  and  frankness, 
and  a  good  debater.  He  has  had  a  limited 
education,  and  speaks  in  a  peasant  patois. 
My  interpreter,  a  Moscow  university  man, 
said,  after  the  interview,  that  he  had  never 
had  a  more  difficult  task  of  interpreting. 

Our  talk  occurred  just  at  the  time  that 
the  NEP,  a  new  economic  policy  of  the  gov¬ 
ernment,  was  being  formulated  and  begin¬ 
ning  to  be  put  into  effect.  Before  this  no  pri¬ 
vate  trading  had  been  permitted  and  all 
surplus  of  the  peasants’  grain  production 
over  the  amount  actually  needed  as  food  for 
the  peasant  families  and  their  stock  was  req¬ 
uisitioned  by  the  state  to  go  into  the  com¬ 
mon  pot  for  government  distribution.  Also 
no  industrial  establishments  could  be  pri¬ 
vately  controlled  nor  could  there  be  any 
private  banking  or  general  commerce.  Na¬ 
tionals  of  other  countries  in  Russia  were 
subject  to  the  same  regulations,  and  hence 
no  foreign  capital  or  industrial  aid  was  com¬ 
ing  in  from  the  outside.  Everything  was  to 
be  undertaken  and  controlled  by  the  whole 
people  as  represented  by  the  various  com- 


SOCIETAL  ORGANIZATION  83 

missars  who  formed  the  government.  There 
was  a  tremendous  civil  list  of  functionaries 
who  were  to  direct  all  the  people’s  activities, 
work  the  railways  and  mines,  cut  the  for¬ 
ests,  collect  and  distribute  the  grain,  manu¬ 
facture  the  needed  cloth  and  clothing,  hats 
and  shoes,  manage  the  hotels  now  become 
“Soviet  guest-houses,”  conduct  the  public 
schools  and  universities,  and  do  all  the  rest 
that  needed  doing  in  Russia  for  the  comfort 
and  happiness  and  even  mere  existence  of 
the  people.  These  functionaries  were  select¬ 
ed  by  no  competitive  method.  There  was  no 
trace  of  vocational  guidance  in  connection 
with  their  assumption  of  special  tasks.  Any 
man  was  held  to  be  as  capable  as  any  other, 
or  if  he  were  proletarian  or  peasant  perhaps 
a  little  more  capable. 

Well,  as  a  result  of  this  a  few  Americans 
had  to  go  to  Russia  to  carry  on  a  program 
of  food  relief  to  save  several  millions  of  men, 
women  and  children  from  starving  to  death, 
or  from  death  by  simply  controllable  epi¬ 
demic  disease.  There  had  been  a  tremen¬ 
dous  falling  off  in  food  production  all  over 
the  land  (only  partially  accounted  for  by 
drouth  in  the  Volga  basin) ;  there  was  no  in¬ 
dustry;  there  were  no  medicines  and  no  hos¬ 
pital  equipment;  there  was  no  coal  to  warm 
the  houses;  there  was  no  money  to  buy  food 


84 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


or  medicines  or  coal  or  manufactured  cloth¬ 
ing  from  outside  countries.  The  people  were 
starving,  freezing,  fleeing  in  panic,  dying. 

“Yes,”  said  Kalinin,  seriously,  “we  have 
been  disappointed.  We  have  made  mistakes; 
we  have  been  unable  to  do  it.  The  govern¬ 
ment  and  the  people  are  in  great  difficulties, 
in  sore  straits.  We  thought  we  could  jump 
at  once  from  a  state  of  capitalism  and  com¬ 
petition  to  a  communistic  millennium.  Well, 
we  haven’t  been  able  to  do  it. 

“We  know  now  that  it  is  a  matter  of  evo¬ 
lution.  We  must  go  through  a  series  of 
stages.  So  we  are  now  going  back  to  enter 
the  first  of  these.  It  may  be  called  the  stage 
of  state  capitalism.  Such  large  enterprises 
as  the  railways,  mines,  a  state  bank,  all 
heavy  industry,  all  export  and  import  trade, 
we  shall  keep  entirely  in  the  hands  of  the 
state.  But  in  agriculture  and  light  industry 
the  peasants  and  small  manufacturers  may 
carry  on  their  affairs  with  only  such  state 
control  as  is  necessary  to  collect  a  tax  in 
kind  from  the  grain  producers  and  a  share 
of  the  profits  from  the  little  factories.  This 
is  the  basis  of  our  new  economic  policy.” 

By  a  few  decrees  NEP  was  put  into  effect. 
The  peasants  have  undisturbed  possession 
of  their  land,  although  they  do  not  yet  own 
it  in  fee  simple.  They  retain  ownership  and 


SOCIETAL  ORGANIZATION  85 

control  of  their  surplus  production,  and  may 
sell  it.  Private  trading  is  restored.  The  small 
industrials  may  have  their  factories  back, 
on  a  sort  of  easy  lease  system — this  to  save 
the  face  of  nationalization — and  may  man¬ 
age  these  factories  themselves. 

The  result  is  an  immediate  bettering  of 
grain  production.  There  is  also  a  beginning 
in  the  rehabilitation  of  light  industry.  Heavy 
industry,  still  in  the  hands  of  the  govern¬ 
ment,  and  managed  by  men  selected  on  the 
principle  of  any  man  being  as  good  as  any 
other,  still  languishes. 

I  have  given  so  much  detailed  attention 
to  the  Russian  situation  because  it  is  a  bril¬ 
liant  illustration  of  the  results  of  social  or¬ 
ganization  based  on  a  nearly  complete  dis¬ 
regard  of  natural  differences  in  men  and 
minds. 

Such  differences  do  exist,  and  not  only  in 
Russia  but  in  all  the  other  countries  of 
Europe  and  of  the  world,  for  that  matter. 
And  this  fact  may  well  be  kept  in  mind 
when  we  indulge  ourselves  in  thinking  or 
talking  or  acting  about  the  building  up,  the 
consolidation  and  the  future  of  the  Ameri¬ 
can  nation.  And  just  now  is  a  time  for  all 
good  men  to  indulge  themselves  seriously 
in  just  this  sort  of  thinking,  discussing  and 
acting. 


RACIAL  TRAITS  AND 
IMMIGRATION 


We  have  before  us  the  pressing  prob¬ 
lem  of  the  so-called  Americanization 
of  the  people  of  America.  A  part  of  this 
problem  is  that  of  analyzing  and  classifying, 
on  various  bases,  and,  of  course  in  no  formal 
way,  our  present  population,  to  the  end  of 
taking  action  educationally  and  socially  to 
try  to  fit  each  individual  to  be  a  useful  and 
contented  citizen.  Another  part  of  this  prob¬ 
lem  is  that  produced  by  the  constant  immi¬ 
gration  of  new  would-be  Americans.  Per¬ 
haps  some  of  these  newcomers  think  less 
about  becoming  Americans  than  about  mere 
escape  to  America  from  other  at  present  less 
comfortable  countries;  or  than  about  just 
finding  jobs  paid  for  in  money  that  doesn’t 
require  reckoning  in  terms  of  astronomical 
figures.  Perhaps  some  of  these  newcomers 
simply  wish  to  follow  the  flow  of  gold,  argu¬ 
ing  to  themselves  that  no  one  can  get  gold, 
the  summum  bonum  in  their  understanding 
of  life,  where  there  is  no  gold,  and  that  any 
one  can  probably  get  some  gold  where 
gold  is. 

But  for  whatever  reasons  our  immigrants 
come,  we  feel  pretty  strongly,  and  certainly 


[  87  ] 


88 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


wisely,  that  these  immigrants  must  be  Amer¬ 
icanized  both  as  extensively  and  as  inten¬ 
sively  as  possible.  By  the  very  nature  of  our 
political  organization  we  are  a  congeries  of 
political  groups  rather  than  a  single  large 
unit  group,  which  is  a  condition  that  of  it¬ 
self  creates  enough  serious  problems.  We  do 
not  want  to  add  even  more  serious  ones  by 
permitting  the  development  in  America  of  a 
kind  of  social  organization,  or,  better,  disor¬ 
ganization,  based  on  racial  differences.  An 
important  question,  therefore,  in  connection 
with  immigration  is  that  touching  the  real¬ 
ity,  and  if  real,  the  character  of  inherent  ra¬ 
cial  differences,  both  physical  and  mental, 
but  especially  mental.  Have  different  races 
different  inherent  mental  levels?  Or,  as  dif¬ 
ferent  mental  levels  undoubtedly  do  exist 
inside  of  any  racial  or  national  group — they 
certainly  exist  here  in  America — do  some 
races  or  nations  send  us,  not  fair  samples  of 
all  their  mental  levels,  but  only  or  prepon- 
deratingly  representatives  of  their  lower  lev¬ 
els  alone?  Some  recently  obtained  data 
throw  much  light  on  the  occurrence  and  dis¬ 
tribution  of  these  levels  in  our  population, 
both  in  that  part  of  it  that  may  be  compar¬ 
atively  called  native  and  in  that  part  of  it 
composed  of  recent  additions  from  various 
foreign  races  and  nationalities. 


RACIAL  TRAITS 


89 


But  before  giving  a  brief  special  consider¬ 
ation  to  these  data  I  want  to  discuss  for  a 
moment  the  question  of  the  reality  of  in¬ 
herent  racial  differences  in  mental  traits. 
Most  of  us,  I  take  it,  would  declare,  at  first 
blush,  that  there  is  no  question  at  all  about 
it:  races  do  differ  in  their  mental  manners, 
as  we  may  call  them.  But  in  saying  this  are 
we  not  looking  at  the  whole  mental  make¬ 
up  of  the  usual  specimens  we  meet  repre¬ 
senting  different  races  or  nationalities?  Are 
we  not  failing  to  distinguish  between  the  in¬ 
herent  (inherited)  mental  traits  and  general 
capacity  of  these  specimens  and  those  traits 
and  manners  acquired  by  environmental  in¬ 
fluences,  the  influences  of  tradition  and  imi¬ 
tation,  of  kinds  of  education  and  politics 
and  religion  characteristic  of  different  races 
or  peoples?  Of  course  these  acquired  charac¬ 
teristics  have  a  real  importance  in  determin¬ 
ing  the  susceptibility  of  these  people  to  be¬ 
ing  more  or  less  quickly  made  over  into 
American-mannered  American  citizens;  to 
being  brought  to  look  at  social  organization 
and  government  from  an  American  point  of 
view.  But  as  these  traditional  or  acquired 
ways  are  really  only  acquirements,  they 
may  be  modified  or  supplanted  more  or  less 
easily  and  quickly  by  other  acquirements 
resulting  from  education  in  and  by  Ameri- 


90 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


can  methods.  They  need  not  necessarily  be 
handed  down  to  their  children,  as  their  in¬ 
herent  mental  qualities  surely  will,  in  some 
rather  definite  measure,  be  passed  on  to 
these  children  by  heredity.  We  are  all  used 
to  seeing  the  marked  difference  in  mental 
point  of  view  and  in  individual  and  social 
behavior  of  these  immigrants,  from  our  own 
point  of  view  and  manners,  but  we  are  also 
all  used  to  seeing  the  marked  differences  in 
point  of  view  and  behavior  of  the  first  and 
second  American  generations  of  immigrant 
foreigners  from  those  of  their  immigrant 
parents.  Some  of  the  loudest  eagle-shriekers 
and  most  declarative  boosters  of  all  things 
American  are  Germans,  Poles  or  Serbians 
only  one  generation  removed.  I  recall  a  very 
large  sign  in  my  small  college  town  in  the 
middle  West  which  indicated  the  place  of 
business  of  “A.  Urbansky,  American  tailor.” 

We  may  have  some  confidence,  then,  that 
through  association  and  education  we  can 
modify  or  replace  foreign  acquirements  by 
home-made  ones,  just  as  we  see  the  incom¬ 
ing  foreign  languages  replaced  by  our  own. 
But  we  can  have  no  such  confidence  with 
regard  to  inherent  or  truly  racial  mental 
traits.  If  there  really  are  racial  differences 
in  mental  traits  our  immigrants  are  not  only 
going  to  bring  them  with  them  but  they  are 


RACIAL  TRAITS 


91 


going  to  hold  them — that  is,  they  can’t  get 
rid  of  them — through  all  their  lives.  And 
then  they  are  going  to  hand  them  on,  little 
or  not  at  all  modified,  to  their  children  and 
their  children’s  children.  Therefore  we  have 
in  these  conditions  a  much  harder  nut  to 
crack  in  the  Americanizing,  in  our  sense  of 
making  like  us,  of  these  people. 

In  a  most  enlightening  paper,  published 
twelve  years  ago,  Professor  R.  S.  Woodworth 
of  Columbia  University  pointed  out  that 
what  studies  of  racial  differences  in  mental 
traits  had  been  made  up  to  that  time,  failed 
to  reveal  any  pronounced  or  even  any  very 
readily  definable  differences  of  this  charac¬ 
ter  among  the  races  studied.  More  recent 
studies  seem  to  confirm  this  conclusion.  In 
the  various  special  senses  these  differences 
are  slight,  and  as  to  general  mental  capacity 
as  distinguished  from  mental  culture  it  is 
much  less  easy  to  say,  with  any  of  that  con¬ 
fidence  so  often  displayed  by  superficial  ob¬ 
servers,  that  racial  differences  in  innate  in¬ 
telligence  of  serious  degree  really  obtain,  at 
least  among  the  races  of  Europe  and  those 
other  countries  which  most  of  our  immi¬ 
grants  represent.  Perhaps  it  is  true  that  the 
so-called  primitive  living  peoples,  like  the 
Bushmen  and  Veddahs  and  native  Austra¬ 
lians,  are  truly  biologically  primitive,  but 


92 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


they  need  not  concern  us;  they  don’t  emi¬ 
grate. 

But  there  does  after  all  seem  to  be  fairly 
good  evidence  that  although  there  is  much 
overlapping  of  races  with  regard  to  mental 
traits  and  capacity,  so  that  it  is  hard  to  set 
up  differential  criteria  on  the  basis  of  differ¬ 
ences  in  such  traits,  some  races  may  be  de¬ 
clared  to  differ  rather  definitely  in  their 
average  or  modal  mental  endowment.  The 
total  range  of  variation  in  mental  character 
may  be  fairly  similar  in  two  races,  but  one 
race  may  have  a  proportionally  larger  num¬ 
ber  of  individuals  below  the  mean  of  the 
range  than  the  other  so  that  the  weighted 
average  of  this  race  or  nation  may  be  said 
to  be  below  that  of  another.  There  is  more 
chance,  then,  of  our  receiving,  if  we  receive 
a  fairly  distributed  sample  of  each  race,  a 
mentally  poorer  contribution  from  one  race 
than  from  another.  Of  course,  we  rarely  do 
receive  a  fairly  distributed  sample  of  a  given 
race.  We  almost  always  get  a  sample  deter¬ 
mined  by  economic  or  political  or  religious 
or  what  not  other  discriminatingly  deter¬ 
mining  conditions.  Sometimes  this  is  a  sam¬ 
ple  of  the  better  individuals  of  the  race; 
sometimes,  and  too  often,  of  the  poorer  ones. 

I  want  now  to  refer  briefly  to  those  re¬ 
cently  obtained  data  which  throw  some 


RACIAL  TRAITS 


93 


light — and  a  rather  startling  light,  it  is — not 
only  on  the  existence  and  distribution  of 
mental  levels,  or  degrees  of  intelligence, 
among  our  present  population,  but,  by  inci¬ 
dence,  on  the  mental  levels  of  the  samples 
of  foreign  population  coming  to  our  coun¬ 
try  from  across  the  seas. 

I  have  earlier  referred  to  the  penetrating 
analysis  made  by  Professor  Brigham  in  his 
recent  book,  called  “A  Study  of  American 
Intelligence,”  of  the  results  of  the  psycho¬ 
logical  examination  of  a  large  fraction  of  the 
American  army  during  the  war  period.  This 
analysis  will  give  any  of  its  readers  much 
food  for  serious  thought.  While  the  book  is 
not  primarily  offered  as  a  discussion  of  the 
immigration  problem  I  quite  agree  with 
what  Dr.  Yerkes  says  of  it  in  a  foreword, 
namely:  “It  is  not  light  or  easy  reading,  but 
it  is  better  worth  re-reading  and  reflective 
pondering  than  any  explicit  discussion  of 
immigration  which  I  happen  to  know.” 

In  the  first  place  it  is  apparent  that  when 
the  white  contingent  in  the  army  draft  is 
compared  with  the  negro  draft  the  scoring 
of  the  whites  on  the  intelligence  tests  is 
much  higher  than  that  of  the  blacks.  When 
the  white  draft  is  divided  into  two  groups, 
namely  white  officers  and  white  privates, 
the  scoring  of  the  white  officers  is  above 


94 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


that  of  the  white  privates  while  the  white 
privates  score  higher  than  the  black  draft. 
The  average  scores  on  the  basis  of  the  so- 
called  combined  scale,  which  has  a  possible 
maximum  of  25,  are  about  19  for  the  white 
officers,  13)4  f°r  the  white  privates  and 
10)4  for  the  black  draft.  With  regard  to  the 
general  distribution  of  intelligence  in  the 
three  groups,  the  analyzed  data  show  that 
98.87%  of  the  white  officers  score  above  the 
average  score  of  the  white  privates,  while 
99.97%  score  above  the  average  of  the  negro 
draft.  Of  the  white  privates  86.31%  are 
above  the  average  of  the  negro  draft,  while 
only  13.13%  of  the  negroes  score  above  the 
average  of  the  white  privates.  But  these 
facts,  concerning  the  relation  of  the  scores 
of  the  whites  to  the  blacks,  interesting  and 
important  as  they  are,  do  not  concern  the 
immigration  problem  and  may  pass  without 
further  comment. 

When  the  white  draft  is  divided  into  two 
groups,  one  of  native  born  and  one  of  for¬ 
eign  born  men,  the  data  show  that  74.8% 
of  the  native  born  exceed  the  average  score 
of  the  foreign  born.  Now,  when  the  foreign 
born  draft  is  divided  into  five  groups  deter¬ 
mined  by  years  of  residence  of  the  individ¬ 
uals  in  the  United  States  as  from  0  years  to 
5,  6  to  10,  11  to  15,  16  to  20,  and  over  20 


RACIAL  TRAITS 


95 


years,  the  interesting  result  is  found  that 
the  average  scores  of  these  groups  increase 
somewhat  with  length  of  American  resi¬ 
dence.  The  average  score  of  the  first  or  0  to 
5  year  group  is  11.41,  of  the  6  to  10  year 
group,  11.74,  of  the  11  to  15  year  group, 
12.47,  of  the  16  to  20  year  group,  13.55,  and 
of  the  over  20  year  group,  13.82. 

Various  explanations  have  been  offered 
for  this  interesting  state  of  affairs.  One  is 
that  residence  in  the  United  States  con¬ 
duces  to  an  improvement  in  native  intelli¬ 
gence,  a  flattering  explanation  but  one  not 
in  line  with  the  assumption  of  the  intelli¬ 
gence  testers  that  the  native  or  inherent  in¬ 
telligence  of  an  individual  is  fixed  some  years 
before  attaining  the  minimum  age  of  army 
service,  and  that  the  intelligence  tests  do 
test  this  inherent  mental  capacity.  Another 
is  that  the  more  intelligent  immigrants  suc¬ 
ceed  and  therefore  remain  in  this  country, 
an  explanation  which  is  weakened  by  the 
fact  that  we  know  that  many  of  the  most 
successful  immigrants  return  to  Europe  to 
spend  their  saved  money. 

Both  of  these  hypotheses  have  been  taken 
into  account  by  Professor  Brigham  and 
tested  by  him  through  ingenious  analysis  of 
the  wealth  of  data  at  his  command,  and  are 
found  incapable  of  explaining  the  fact  of 


96 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


this  difference  of  intelligence  among  the  for¬ 
eign-born  who  have  been  resident  in  the 
country  for  shorter  or  longer  periods.  But 
another  hypothesis  is  left,  which  seems  real¬ 
ly  to  be  the  true  solution  of  the  riddle,  and 
that  is  that  the  immigrants  that  have  been 
more  recently  coming  to  us  are  of  a  lower 
grade  of  intelligence  than  the  incomers  of 
former  years.  This  in  turn  indicates  a  change 
in  the  character  of  recent  as  compared  with 
earlier  immigration.  An  analysis  of  the 
available  data  shows,  indeed,  that  this  lat¬ 
ter  assumption  of  a  change  in  character  of 
immigration  is  correct. 

In  the  years  from  1887  to  1897  the  immi¬ 
grants,  who  are  the  ones  composing  now  the 
‘‘over  20  years  in  residence”  group  of  the 
foreign-born  army  draft,  included  consider¬ 
able  numbers  from  England,  Scotland,  Ire¬ 
land,  Holland,  Denmark,  Norway,  Sweden 
and  Germany,  but  these  numbers  decreased 
materially  after  1897  and  in  recent  years 
have  been  comparatively  small.  On  the  other 
hand  the  immigration  in  recent  years  has 
included  large  contingents  from  Russia,  It¬ 
aly,  and  Greece.  Austria  has  sent  over  large 
contingents  through  all  of  the  past  twenty- 
five  years.  An  analysis  of  the  intelligence 
scores  of  the  foreign-born  recruits  represent¬ 
ing  the  various  European  countries  in  the 


RACIAL  TRAITS 


97 


army  draft  shows  a  marked  variation  in 
these  scores  with  the  English,  Scots,  Dutch, 
German  and  Scandinavian  groups  ranking 
much  higher  than  the  Russian,  Greek,  Ital¬ 
ian  and  Polish  groups.  For  example,  of  the 
recruits  born  in  England,  19%  were  ranked 
in  the  A  and  B  intelligence  groups ;  of  those 
born  in  Scotland,  13.1%;  in  Holland,  12.4%; 
in  Germany,  10%;  in  Denmark,  7%;  in 
Sweden,  5.9% ;  in  Norway,  5.3%;  while  only 
3.3%  of  those  born  in  Russia  ranked  in 
these  groups,  2.2%  of  those  born  in  Greece, 
1.5%  of  the  Italians  and  1.1%  of  the  Polish. 
On  the  other  hand,  63.8%  of  the  Polish- 
born  recruits  were  in  the  D  and  E  (lowest) 
groups,  60.5%  of  the  Italians,  55.7%  of  the 
Russians,  44.6%  of  the  Greeks,  23.2%  of 
the  Swedes,  17%  of  the  Danes,  16.2%  of  the 
Germans,  13.5%  of  the  Scotch,  12%  of  the 
Dutch,  and  8.8%  of  the  English. 

If  we  group  these  nationalities — they  can 
hardly  be  called  races — according  to  a  racial 
classification,  now  in  much  favor,  as  Nor¬ 
dics,  Alpines  and  Mediterraneans,  it  be¬ 
comes  apparent  that  of  the  immigration 
from  1840  to  1890  from  40%  to  50%  was  of 
so-called  Nordic  blood,  the  rest  being  about 
equally  divided  between  Alpine  and  Medi¬ 
terranean  blood.  Since  1890,  however,  the 
Nordic  blood  has  dropped  to  20%  or  25%, 


98 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


the  Alpine  stock  has  increased  to  about 
50%,  and  the  Mediterranean  has  remained 
at  about  25%.  And  with  this  change,  from 
earlier  years  to  later  ones,  of  the  propor¬ 
tions  in  the  various  racial  stocks  coming  to 
America  from  Europe  there  has  been  also 
a  change  for  the  worse  in  the  average  intel¬ 
ligence  of  the  immigrants  coming  to  merge 
into  our  population. 

But  it  is  to  be  noted  that  while  the  marked 
change  in  proportion  of  Nordic  blood  to  Al¬ 
pine-Mediterranean  began  about  1890  the 
marked  drop  in  immigrant  intelligence  came 
only  in  1902  and  later.  Which  indicates  that 
it  was  not  alone,  or  even  perhaps  principal¬ 
ly,  the  change  in  proportion  of  racial  stocks 
that  produced  the  change  in  average  intel¬ 
ligence,  but  that  there  was  a  change  in 
character  of  the  incoming  samples  of  all  the 
stocks  as  between  earlier  and  later  years. 
The  natural  conclusion  of  Professor  Brig¬ 
ham  is,  then,  that  the  obvious  decline 
in  intelligence  of  the  immigrants  of  later 
years  as  compared  with  that  of  those  of  ear¬ 
lier  years  is  due  to  two  factors ;  first,  a  change 
in  the  proportion  of  races  migrating  to  this 
country,  and,  second,  a  change  for  the  worse 
in  the  incoming  samples  of  each  race. 

One  hastens  to  say  that  neither  Professor 
Brigham  nor  anyone  else  would  necessarily 


RACIAL  TRAITS 


99 


conclude  from  an  analysis  of  the  intelligence 
status  of  the  European  immigrants  to  this 
country  in  the  last  half  century  anything 
definitively  with  regard  to  the  average  in¬ 
telligence  of  the  different  nationalities  or 
racial  stocks  represented  by  these  immi¬ 
grants — although  one  might  strongly  sus¬ 
pect  something.  But  what  one  does  conclude 
definitively  is  that  the  samples  of  the  differ¬ 
ent  European  nationalities  and  races  mak¬ 
ing  up  this  total  immigration  do  reveal 
marked  differences  in  average  intelligence 
and  that,  unfortunately,  the  recent  samples 
of  all  the  races  have  been  poorer  than  the 
earlier  ones,  and  the  samples  of  the  South¬ 
ern  and  Eastern  European  peoples,  have 
been  poorer  than  the  samples  of  the  North¬ 
ern  and  Western  peoples. 

It  is  quite  certain  that  we  have  received 
from  Europe  since  the  beginning  of  this  cen¬ 
tury  millions  of  immigrants  with  an  average 
intelligence  markedly  below  that  of  our  na¬ 
tive-born  population.  A  considerable  frac¬ 
tion  of  this  immigrant  population  has  an 
average  intelligence  even  distinctly  below 
that  of  our  negro  population.  To  the  extent 
that  this  foreign  population  mixes  by  mar¬ 
riage  with  our  native  population,  there  is 
going  on  through  the  positive  influence  of 
heredity  a  lowering  in  the  average  mental 


100  MIND  AND  HEREDITY 

capacity  of  the  American  nation.  If  there  is 
any  immediate  political  advantage  in  such 
a  blending  of  blood,  so  that  these  foreigners 
may  become  less  foreign  and  more  Ameri¬ 
can,  or  be  Americanized,  as  we  say,  there  is 
on  the  other  hand  a  biological  or  evolution¬ 
ary  disadvantage  in  this  happening,  for  the 
general  biological  results  of  a  blood-mixing 
of  higher  and  lower  orders  of  intelligence 
must  be  an  approximation  of  a  mean  be¬ 
tween  these  orders.  While,  then,  political  or 
immediate  economic  expediency  may  sug¬ 
gest  one  course  of  action,  science  suggests 
another.  Politics  and  economics  may  sug¬ 
gest  a  free  inflow  of  unselected  immigrants 
to  meet  the  needs  for  labor,  especially  mere 
manual  labor,  and  an  4 ‘Americanization’ ’  of 
this  inflow  through  assimilation  into  the 
native  population  by  education  and  inter¬ 
marriage.  Science  suggests  a  checking  of  this 
inflow,  or  at  least  a  strongly  selective  con¬ 
trol  of  it. 


HEREDITY  AND  ENVIRONMENT 
IN  MIND  DETERMINATION 


lthough  it  is  obvious,  I  hope,  that  the 


first  intention  of  this  discussion  of  mind 


is  especially  to  call  attention  to  the  reality 
and  significance  of  the  heredity  factor  in 
the  determination  of  the  character  and  ca¬ 
pacity  of  mind,  I  hope  my  emphasis  of  the 
fact  of  direct  inheritance  of  mental  traits 
and  capacity  comparable  in  manner  and  de¬ 
gree  with  the  inheritance  of  physical  traits, 
will  lead  no  one  to  believe  that  I  overlook 
the  reality  and  importance  of  other  factors 
in  mind  determination.  There  are,  of  course, 
other  important  factors.  Some  of  these  also 
have  a  strong  heredity  element  in  them: 
others  are  almost  strictly  environmental 
factors. 

Our  new  knowledge  of  the  extraordinary 
influence  of  the  secretions  of  the  ductless 
glands  on  the  growth,  development  and  gen¬ 
eral  metabolism  of  the  animal  (including 
the  human)  body,  affecting  various  organs 
of  the  body  in  very  positive  ways  both  as  to 
structure  and  functioning,  includes  a  reve¬ 
lation  of  the  immense  importance  of  these 
secretions  in  relation  to  our  mental  and  gen¬ 
eral  nervous  make-up.  We  have  for  long 


’[  101  ] 


102  MIND  AND  HEREDITY 

been  accustomed  to  think  of  the  nervous 
system  as  the  general  manager  of  the  body. 
We  must  now  recognize  the  secretions  of  the 
ductless  glands  as,  in  some  degree,  general 
manager  of  the  nervous  system.  Although 
these  secretions,  called  hormones  (“exci¬ 
tants”),  are  produced  in  comparatively  very 
small  quantities,  yet,  like  the  equally  small 
quantities  of  vitamines  and  enzymes,  they 
have  very  powerful  effects. 

Nearly  three  tons  of  fresh  thyroid  gland 
tissue  have  to  be  used  to  get  one  ounce  of 
thyroxin,  the  hormone  secreted  by  the  thy¬ 
roid.  But  if  there  is  too  little  thyroxin  secret¬ 
ed  into  the  blood  by  the  thyroid  gland  of  a 
child,  this  whole  gland  weighing  hardly 
more  than  an  ounce,  that  child  may  become 
a  cretin  with  not  only  dreadful  physical  de¬ 
formity  but  with  the  deformed  or  incom¬ 
plete  mind  of  an  idiot.  If  there  is  a  little  too 
much  the  child  may  have  a  goiter,  protrud¬ 
ing  eye-balls,  a  too  rapid  heart,  and  a  rest¬ 
less,  irritable  brain.  The  pituitary  gland 
weighs  one-sixtieth  of  an  ounce,  but  if  it  is 
removed  death  ensues.  If  its  secretions  are 
too  small  in  amount  during  childhood, 
growth  is  inhibited  and  a  dwarf  is  produced, 
usually  with  psychic  derangements;  if  too 
large  in  amount  giantism  occurs  often  with 
accompanying  imbecility.  The  secretions 


HEREDITY  AND  ENVITONMENT  103 

(called  adrenaline)  of  the  adrenal  glands, 
two  small  bodies  lying  near  the  kidneys  and 
weighing  about  one-seventh  of  an  ounce 
each,  have,  almost  certainly,  a  marked  ef¬ 
fect  on  our  nervous  system,  revealed  by 
strong  emotional  responses  to  the  variation 
in  the  amount  of  the  secretions.  Crile  de¬ 
clares  that  “apparently  adrenaline  alone 
can  cause  the  brain  greatly  to  increase  its 
work.”  And  Professor  Cushing,  in  an  article 
suggestively  entitled,  “Psychic  Disturb¬ 
ances  Associated  with  Disorders  of  the 
Ductless  Glands,”  says,  “it  is  quite  prob¬ 
able  that  the  psycho-pathology  of  every¬ 
day  life  hinges  largely  upon  the  effect  of 
ductless  gland  discharges  upon  the  nervous 
system.”  Thus  psycho-analysis  with  its  ex¬ 
planations  of  dreams,  symbolisms,  etc.,  may 
come  to  the  necessity  of  basing  itself  on 
study  of  the  hormones. 

The  reference  to  emotional  reactions  in¬ 
troduces  us  conveniently  to  a  word  about 
the  part  that  the  emotions,  as  contrasted 
with  intelligence  and  reason,  play  in  deter¬ 
mining  our  mental  make-up  and  our  activi¬ 
ties. 

Hugh  Elliott  in  a  recent  book,  called 
“Human  Character,”  presents  a  strong  brief 
for  what  he  calls  “the  all-importance  of  the 
emotional  states  in  the  determination  of  be- 


104 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


havior.  .  .  .  Emotions  are  the  represen¬ 
tation  in  consciousness,  the  subjective  side, 
of  the  complex  series  of  automatic  reactions 
which  in  animals  we  call  instincts,  and 
which,  in  their  case,  we  only  occasionally 
endow  with  emotional  attributes.  Thus  the 
quest  for  food,  flight  from  an  enemy,  pur¬ 
suit  of  a  mate,  are  all  automatic  reactions 
which  are  shared  by  man  with  the  lower  ani¬ 
mals,  but  in  the  case  of  man  we  say  they  are 
due  to  the  emotions  of  hunger,  fear  and  love. 

.  .  .  Man’s  life  thus  becomes,”  says  Elliot, 
“a  series  of  instinctive  reactions  differing 
from  those  of  the  lower  animals  only  in  their 
greater  complexity  and  in  the  extent  to 
which  they  are  varied  as  the  result  of  indi¬ 
vidual  training  or  education.  Reason  does 
not  dictate  behavior.  ...  It  is  but  the 
instrument  for  the  safer  and  more  successful 
carrying  out  of  a  reaction  which  will  satisfy 
the  prevailing  emotion.” 

We  need  not  follow  these  rather  dogmatic 
assertions  any  farther  than  we  please,  but 
most  of  us  will  see  some  element  of  truth  in 
them.  Without  undertaking  in  any  least  de¬ 
gree  a  scientific  study  of  the  relation  of  emo¬ 
tions,  temperament,  disposition,  the  affect¬ 
ive  qualities  in  general,  to  behavior,  most  of 
us  will  recognize  and  admit  this  relation  to 
be  an  intimate  one.  We  see  illustrations  of  it 


HEREDITY  AND  ENVIRONMENT  105 

in  ourselves,  in  the  different  members  of  our 
family,  in  our  friends  and  acquaintances. 
We  know  how  we  and  they  will  react  to  va¬ 
rious  stimuli  because  we  know  the  character 
of  these  qualities  in  them.  We  distinguish 
readily  these  temperamental  differences 
even  among  strangers  whom  we  meet  for 
the  first  time  at  dinner,  in  clubs,  in  public 
meetings,  in  traveling.  We  find  some  minds 
distinctly  congenial  and  some  antipathetic 
without  regard  to  the  acquirements  of  in¬ 
formation  or  the  polish  of  education  or  its 
lack. 

And  most  of  us  will  also  recognize  the  es¬ 
sentially  inherent  or  native  character  of 
these  qualities.  They  show  themselves  early 
in  childhood ;  they  persist  until  death  or  se¬ 
nility.  They  are  not  acquirements.  Environ¬ 
ment  or  education  does  not  create  them;  it 
only  gives  them  opportunity  or  tries  to  in¬ 
hibit  them. 

This  brings  us  finally  to  the  matter — 
truly  an  immensely  important  matter — of 
the  environmental  and  educational  factors 
in  the  determination  of  mental  make-up,  of 
kinds  of  minds.  With  direct  inheritance  of 
mental  capacity,  with  the  inheritance  of 
emotions  and  temperament,  and  with  the 
inheritance  of  differences  in  the  functioning 
of  the  ductless  glands  whose  secretions  pow- 


106 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


erfully  affect  both  emotions  and  intelligence, 
we  have  an  imposing  array  of  inherited  fac¬ 
tors  in  mental  and  nervous  make-up,  in  a 
word,  in  mind.  How  imposing  and  impor¬ 
tant  are  the  environmental  and  educational 
factors?  Can  we  nullify  or  ameliorate  bad 
mental  inheritance  by  good  environment 
and  education?  How  far  can  we  compensate 
for  inherited  weakness  by  acquired  strength? 
Can  good  teachers  make  Class  A  minds  out 
of  Class  B  brains?  Can  we  put  a  thousand 
dollar  education  into  a  hundred  dollar  boy? 

I  am  not  going  to  try  to  answer  these 
questions.  I  am  not  going  to  discuss  the 
values  and  methods  of  education.  I  am  pre¬ 
senting  the  unpopular  side  of  the  problem 
of  kinds  and  grades  of  mind;  the  side  espe¬ 
cially  unpopular  in  a  political  democracy 
committed  to  democratic  education.  I  may 
express,  though,  in  order  not  to  be  too  un¬ 
popular,  my  conviction  that  nothing  that 
our  knowledge  of  mental  inheritance  teaches 
us  prevents  us  from  putting  a  large  faith 
and  hence  a  large  effort  in  education,  and  in 
democratic  education  at  that.  Only  my  idea 
of  a  democratic  education  is  not  gained 
from  shouting  the  slogan  of  the  equality  of 
all  men  but  from  shouting  the  slogan  of  the 
equality  of  opportunity  for  all  men.  I  was  a 
university  teacher  for  twenty  years  and 


HEREDITY  AND  ENVIRONMENT  107 

more.  And  I  tried  to  do  my  utmost  for  my 
students.  But  I  do  not  remember  that  I 
ever  outfought  nature  with  my  weapon  of 
nurture.  I  do  remember,  however,  helping  a 
variety  of  young  minds  toward  the  attain¬ 
ment  of  a  variety  of  possibilities  open  to 
these  minds.  That  is  my  idea  of  true  democ¬ 
racy  in  education.  Nature  without  nurture 
can  make  nothing  out  of  us;  nor  can  nur¬ 
ture  without  nature  make  anything  out  of 
us.  With  either  alone  we  are  nothing.  We 
must  have  both  to  be  anything,  and  there  is 
a  special  right  kind  of  nurture  for  each  espe¬ 
cial  kind  of  nature.  Heredity  and  environ¬ 
ment  are  complements,  not  antitheses,  in  all 
development. 

The  chief  concern  of  our  universities  is 
education,  and  education  seems  to  be  at  an 
experimental  stage.  Many  universities  in  re¬ 
cent  years  have  been  swinging  back  and 
forth  between  fixed  courses  and  elective 
ones;  between  encouraging  the  classics  and 
encouraging  the  sciences;  between  an  espe¬ 
cial  devotion  to  the  inferior  students  and  a 
special  attention  to  the  superior  ones;  be¬ 
tween  general  education  and  vocational  ed¬ 
ucation.  Perhaps  we  educators  have  de¬ 
voted  more  time  to  the  trial  and  error 
method  of  learning  our  business  than  to 
the  method  of  finding  out  fundamental 


108 


MIND  AND  HEREDITY 


facts  about  human  make-up  and  possi¬ 
bilities. 

In  Russia  they  assume  that  anyone  can 
do  anything,  the  only  problem  being  to  de¬ 
fine  the  different  things  needing  to  be  done 
and  to  assign  by  lot  each  person  to  a  speci¬ 
fied  task.  We  do  not  believe  in  quite  so  sim¬ 
ple  a  solution  of  the  problem  of  social  or¬ 
ganization.  I  have  tried  to  show  one  of  the 
reasons  why  it  isn’t  so  simple.  This  reason 
is  the  influence  of  heredity  in  determining 
mental  make-up.  It  remains  for  someone  to 
determine  the  character  and  potency  of  the 
environmental  and  educational  factors  in 
the  determination  of  mental  make-up;  in 
the  levelling  up — or  down — of  mind,  or  in 
the  amelioration  of  bad  heredity  and  the  re¬ 
inforcement  of  good  heredity. 


Date  Due 


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